Many organizations are adopting DevOps to streamline their software development and operations processes.
However, manually managing DevOps tasks can be time-consuming and prone to human error. Therefore, it is important to automate most of these tasks to deploy software into production quickly. DevOps orchestration is critical in this regard, as it enables automated coordination and management of complex DevOps workflows and processes.
This article is your complete guide to DevOps orchestration, its role in the DevOps environment, and the best tools to try.
DevOps orchestration refers to the process of coordinating and managing all your independent DevOps processes and automation tools or technologies. Orchestrating your automated tasks ensures that all IT components work together and that you maximize the potential of your automation tools, resulting in faster application deployment to achieve business objectives.
For instance, if you have a cloud-native deployment pipeline, DevOps orchestration will make it possible for you to combine development, QA, and production. DevOps orchestration includes key components such as:
Many people often confuse DevOps automation and orchestration, but both are different terms. DevOps automation primarily refers to the set of tools and technologies that help your development and operation teams perform repetitive tasks without human intervention. These can include code compilation, testing, deployment, and infrastructure management.
Orchestration, as mentioned earlier, is the coordination and sequencing of multiple independent automated tasks to create a streamlined workflow. It makes it easy to manage different dependencies and ensure all automated processes and tools work together cohesively.
In simple words, automation focuses on executing single tasks automatically, while orchestration links and coordinates all these tasks to create a complex workflow. It plays a great role in ensuring a smooth transition from one task to the other.
Learn more about the importance of DevOps Automation.
The business world is becoming highly competitive, and the DevOps team needs new tools and technologies to exceed customer expectations. As this IT infrastructure becomes more complex, involving numerous servers, systems, and applications across different locations, orchestration becomes your savior.
It creates logical workflows that connect individual automated tasks and trigger every action at the right time. Hence, business operations become more efficient and easier to manage.
The benefits of DevOps workflow orchestration range from increased software reliability to less time to market your products. Let’s get into the details of these benefits:
#1. Increased Efficiency and Faster Time to Market
DevOps orchestration is essential for enhancing the efficiency of your DevOps processes by automating and coordinating complex workflows. It ensures that all automated tasks are completed in the correct sequence, reducing the time and effort needed to deploy software. This helps DevOps teams release new features and updates more quickly, accelerating their time to market and gaining a competitive edge.
#2. Improved Consistency and Reliability of Deployments
Another benefit of DevOps orchestration is that it improves the consistency and reliability of your deployments. It does so by assuring that every deployment follows the same standardized process, reducing the likelihood of errors and inconsistencies. So, each stage of the pipeline— from code integration and testing to deployment and monitoring— is carefully managed and executed, increasing your business stability.
#3. Reduced Risk of Errors and Production Issues
DevOps orchestration automates and manages most of your repetitive tasks, freeing the valuable time of your DevOps teams. In addition, it has components like Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery that further detect production problems and issues with codes earlier, so there’s minimum downtime. This not only allows your teams to focus on more critical tasks but also improves user experience as there are fewer bugs and issues in the software.
#4. Enhanced Collaboration Between Development and Operations Teams
You may not know this, but DevOps orchestration also plays a role in enhancing collaboration between your development and operation teams. How? It breaks down silos and provides a unified platform for both teams to work together seamlessly. They can communicate and discuss different software issues throughout the pipeline and find solutions for quick deployment.
Moreover, tasks are also clearly defined and accessible to everyone involved. This reduces misunderstandings and finger-pointing, as each team understands their responsibilities and the dependencies between tasks. As a result, you see a more positive and cohesive work environment.
#5. Increased Visibility and Control Over the entire DevOps Pipeline
Last but definitely not least, one of the benefits of orchestration in DevOps is the increased visibility and control it offers over the entire DevOps pipeline. You can easily see all processes and workflows in real time, which allows you to identify issues early on.
Then, you can modify processes, add new tasks, or reconfigure existing ones to adapt to changing requirements. This flexibility and control ensures that the DevOps pipeline remains responsive to business needs.
There are a few key considerations you must take into account when implementing DevOps orchestration. These include designing the workflow, handling errors, and monitoring the features of the orchestrating solution. Here’s a detailed information about each point:
#1. Workflow Designing
Firstly, the DevOps orchestration workflows should be clear, efficient, and scalable. Easy-to-understand and follow tasks with clearly defined steps and dependencies ensure that all team members can easily comprehend and contribute to the processes.
Efficiency is also of utmost importance. Therefore, the solution should optimize each step to minimize delays and resource usage so tasks are performed swiftly.
In addition, it should have scaling capabilities to accommodate growth and changing DevOps requirements. This makes sure that you are capable of handling complex processes without degrading performance.
#2. Robust Error Handling and Recovery Mechanism
The DevOps orchestration solution should have a robust error handling and recovery mechanism. It must help you find out potential points of failure and design workflows to manage errors gracefully. Besides, it should have some automatic error-handling features.
For instance, when an error occurs, the system should automatically trigger predefined recovery actions, such as retrying the failed task, rolling back to a previous stable state, or alerting the relevant team members. These mechanisms will prevent issues from escalating, reducing the need for costly maintenance and accelerating software delivery.
#3. Proper Monitoring and Logging Capabilities
Look for a DevOps orchestration tool that has excellent monitoring and logging capabilities. Why? Continuous monitoring provides real-time insights into the performance and health of the workflows.
On the other hand, logging records of the details of every action taken creates an audit trail that can be used for troubleshooting and analysis. This helps your DevOps teams refine processes and workflows, boosting overall operational reliability.
Now that you are aware of the key factors that the best DevOps orchestration tools should have, the list of DevOps toolchain that provide you with scalability and efficiency is given as:
The first one on our list of the best DevOps orchestration tools is Jenkins. It’s an open-source tool that offers multiple plugins to streamline your DevOps projects’ creation, deployment, and automation. It comes with plenty of features like access control, activity dashboard, system monitoring, and application management. This tool typically comes with an API and can easily integrate with many third-party tools such as Microsoft Azure, Gatekeeper, and GitHub.
Key Features:
GitLab is an exceptional platform with powerful orchestration capabilities that enables software innovation by providing your DevOps teams with useful system insights. It helps teams throughout the DevOps lifecycle and allows them to quickly create, deliver, and manage code.
This tool’s security features are at the next level. It has built-in security scans, providing comprehensive security solutions. It’s also cloud-agnostic, which means it can be deployed anywhere without worrying about vendor lock-in.
Key Features:
The last option on our list is Azure or Microsoft Azure. This DevOps orchestration software or tool is quite popular, and over 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on Azure for their operations. This container orchestration platform offers plenty of functionality options, including on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge capability.
It supports different languages and allows developers to develop and deploy codes efficiently. It’s an open-source platform that is Linux, Windows, and container-compatible. The best part? It’s also very easy to set up and has a low learning curve.
Key Features:
If you are all set to implement DevOps orchestration in your business DevOps operations, there are some best practices you should follow. These include opting for agile project management methods, getting continuous feedback, and setting up automated testing. Let’s discuss these DevOps practices in detail:
You should adopt agile project management methods like Scrum and Kanban. These methods help you break down large and complex workflows into small and manageable chunks, so your DevOps container orchestration efforts yield results quickly. They also help teams collaborate more efficiently, which is key for quick issue resolution.
Feedback is important as it greatly improves the quality of the final product. Therefore, throughout the DevOps pipeline, you should seek feedback from team members and all key stakeholders. This feedback loop helps refine processes, enhance product quality, and increase customer satisfaction.
Your DevOps orchestration efforts won’t bore fruits unless you implement a robust observability plan. It’s because observability helps you monitor, trace, and understand the internal state of systems and workflows.
That’s why improving your observability efforts is essential to gaining insights into the performance and behavior of applications and infrastructure. You’ll see better decision-making and more efficient DevOps management.
Automated testing is also very crucial for DevOps orchestration. You should set up automated tests to quickly identify defects, maintain code quality, and reduce the risk of errors in production. This ensures that codes are properly checked and verified before integration and deployment.
DevOps orchestration is the heart of your DevOps operations, linking all your independent automated tasks to ensure that you create efficient, reliable, and scalable workflows. Some DevOps orchestration tools include Jenkins, Microsoft Azure, and GitLab.
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