DEVOPSdigest

The present-day DevOps ecosystem is comprised of complex deployment and challenges. DevOps engineers, daily, need to deal with clustered applications, containerized applications, diversified production environments, multiple cloud platforms, and applications with complex dependencies. This is where the DevOps orchestration platform comes in handy to simplify the processes and ensure all the tasks are accomplished in a streamlined manner. With an orchestration platform, you can deploy automation tools and also combine everything into a unified workflow.

1. Accelerate automation

With DevOps orchestration, your DevOps team can ensure seamless and speedy delivery of new builds into production as almost all the labor-intensive, repetitive tasks are automated. As a result, the team can divert their focus on business-critical projects rather than spending on building pipelines and repetitive tasks.‍

2. Foster collaboration

The DevOps orchestration platform consolidates all the activities into a single workflow and updates them constantly. This effectively builds seamless collaboration and communication between developers and operations teams, with everyone in sync throughout all the steps. 

3. Improve product quality

DevOps orchestration enables your teams to implement continuous quality control activities such as approval checks, scheduling, security testing, and automatic status reporting. This continuous testing ensures that code errors are identified and resolved before they reach the end user and become major issues.

4. Reduce costs

With DevOps orchestration, you can significantly save costs on the IT infrastructure and employees required for DevOps workflow. You can also easily expand the footprint of your cloud services and have control over your cost allocation.

5. Improve visibility across the SDLC

When tasks are siloed and the information is spread across different notes, it becomes challenging to build real-time visibility throughout the project. However, with DevOps orchestration, you can easily coordinate all the DevOps tasks, centralize data of all operations, and give complete visibility of the progress to key stakeholders throughout the software development lifecycle.

6. Boost time to market

DevOps orchestration imbibes optimal automation throughout the DevOps lifecycle and facilitates the automatic movement of code through certain procedures such as testing and on to the next stage of a release pipeline. This way, the product reaches the end-user faster without having to wait for another employee to finish the manual duties. With this high level of automation, your DevOps team can focus on developing more products and pushing them to market more quickly, which consequently results in cost savings and revenue gains.

7. Effective security

Developers, security engineers, and the operations team frequently access project information in different ways. So, you need to implement independent access controls, clearly defined by role. Managing and monitoring these controls can be an arduous task. However, with DevOps orchestration platforms, you can easily implement and manage these controls, thereby improving security across the project lifecycle.

How to Choose a DevOps Orchestration Platform

DevOps tools have become the key elements of the modern software ecosystem. In the present-day customer-centric world where end-users demand fast, reliable, high-quality software products, these tools enabled organizations to significantly bring down the time between software development and delivery. And DevOps orchestration tools help businesses to implement optimal automation across the software development lifecycle to handle complex, resource-intensive activities like provisioning, load-balancing, scalability, and security. This results in a streamlined, dynamic workflow that significantly reduces overall costs, increases productivity and enhances cross-team collaboration.

However, choosing the DevOps orchestration platforms that best suit your business objectives can be challenging. Your orchestration tool selection depends on a wide variety of considerations such as your current DevOps posture, financial resources, business objectives, and organization size. So, to make it easy for you, we have curated a list of features that you need to consider while you choose your DevOps orchestration platforms:

1. High compatibility: Choose orchestration tools that are compatible with a wide range of DevOps tools and environments. Your tool must support integration with continuous integration tools and version control systems. Moreover, the tool must foster partner ecosystems to provide support for building apps that aren't in its scope.

2. Optimal usability: DevOps orchestration tools are for handling complex DevOps processes like configuration of build processes. So, the best tools are simple to learn and easy to use, besides being enriched with features that facilitate effective collaboration.

3. Simplified user interface: Your DevOps orchestration platform's UI/UX interface is the first point of contact for your team. So, look for tools that facilitate easy navigation with a clean, simple, and user-friendly interface. 

4. Cost-effective: Affordability is the key factor that affects the tool buy-in decision-making. So, look for tools that are cost-effective and provide value for money.

5. Integrated automation: An orchestration platform, to be effective, must have automation pervasively integrated into the core of its operations. This is especially crucial for the tools that significantly impact productivity and cost savings.

6. Cloud agnostic: There's no question that the cloud is the place to be. Therefore, DevOps orchestration tools that facilitate the 'build once, deploy everywhere' feature are the need of the hour. In addition to on-premise system deployment, look for tools that also support cloud deployments.

7. CI/CD pipeline: DevOps primarily relies on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline that facilities the development and delivery of well-tested, high-quality software at high speed. Therefore, your DevOps orchestration tool must be embedded with robust CI/CD pipelines.

8. Container management: Your DevOps orchestration tool must effectively run microservices and containerized applications. This is one of the key features that orchestration tools must pose as Kubernetes and containers are the most popular ways to modernize legacy applications and deliver software at scale.