Orchestration

Orchestration refers to the automated coordination and management of complex IT systems and services. It involves integrating disparate systems and automating tasks to deliver services more efficiently.

Orchestration tools allow you to define the desired state of your infrastructure and applications, then automatically provision and configure resources to match that state. For example, an orchestration tool could be used to deploy a multi-tier application across virtual machines or containers. It would coordinate provisioning the VMs/containers, installing dependencies, configuring networks, and deploying the application code. The orchestrator ensures the desired state is maintained even as infrastructure changes. If a server fails, it may automatically redeploy that component to a new server.

Popular orchestration tools include Kubernetes for container orchestration, Terraform for infrastructure provisioning, and Ansible for configuration management. Orchestration helps simplify management of complex, distributed systems. It enables infrastructure automation, self-service deployments, and improves reliability through self-healing capabilities.