IT Orchestration Is the Secret Behind Smooth, Scalable IT Operations
The success of Coachella — and any music festival, for that matter — is not accidental. Behind the smooth transition between 150+ artists across multiple stages is the complex orchestration of timing, resources, and coordination. It’s an impressive undertaking, and one could argue there are similarities between festival production and enterprise IT operations.
I have always been intrigued by the parallels between IT operators and backstage workers, who are often unsung heroes quietly working behind the scenes to provide the audience with a seamless and enjoyable musical experience.
Festival producers orchestrate a complex ecosystem where failure isn’t an option, and the audience expects a seamless experience without being aware of the complexity behind it. Similarly, IT teams have internal and external customers who expect deployments to be orchestrated with 100% success. They need to anticipate failures and be cognizant of inherent complexities in the design.
ITOps is about managing and coordinating numerous tasks, some of which run in parallel, others require sequencing, and some that need to be performed ad hoc, while others must be scheduled for later in the day. And, of course, there is the added burden of managing vulnerabilities and maintaining compliance.
To this day, I have seen IT organizations, both large and small, attempt to orchestrate complex tasks manually. In a misguided attempt to save costs, they failed alarmingly to complete workloads on time. Not only do costs rise, but vulnerabilities also find a way to creep in. Caught in a catch-22, remedial measures inflict more stress, and soon enough, they find themselves entrapped in the vicious cycle of manual detection and remediation.
Orchestration can be a simple and effective solution.
Orchestration Matters More Than Ever
Job orchestration transcends simple automation. While automation focuses on executing individual tasks, orchestration coordinates multiple automated processes to work harmoniously. Complex IT infrastructure demands streamlined and mature orchestration capabilities to help achieve higher operational efficiency and faster incident resolution. For instance:
- Act as a Resource Scheduling Engine: Festival systems allocate power capacity, technical staff and equipment on demand. An enterprise’s requirements are no different. DevSecOps processes include workloads that span VMs, containers, edge devices and cloud native services. An orchestration solution can significantly help allocate and schedule resources dynamically across heterogeneous systems. Consider when an IT team needs to allocate compute and memory resources, which might be based on priority (say, downtime) or security posture (say, vulnerability), or when they must dynamically scale up or down based on an event like a vulnerability alert or compliance scan. In these situations, orchestration solutions can create workflows that dynamically shut down nodes, spin up new instances and perform various remediation tasks, ad-hoc or pre-planned.
- Help in Automated Dependency Management: In complex and dynamic IT environments, dependencies between resources, services and security controls constantly shift. CI/CD tools, security scanners and cloud platforms introduce their dependencies. For example, a container must be scanned before deployment, and a secret must be rotated before a service can restart. In all these scenarios, dependencies need to be recalculated. Managing these dependencies manually is a near-impossible and massively Herculean task, especially in large environments. Effective orchestration helps maintain these dependencies and keep all processes executed correctly across interdependent tools and environments, avoiding all manual handoffs.
- Provide Real-Time Monitoring: The power to change lies in the ability to observe. I’m sure a music conductor will vouch for that. Having a larger view of the entire ensemble gives you the power to conduct as well as correct. Similarly, ITOps need real-time visibility and control of the IT environment. Orchestration solutions that provide wholesome dashboards provide metrics across all operational zones, like enterprise observability platforms. This helps operators to monitor systems and detect anomalies in real-time, allowing them to focus on high-priority events and collaborate across disparate teams.
- Keep Systems Resilient with Fault Tolerance: IT operators are responsible for the system availability, security and performance, even in adverse conditions. DevSecOps pipelines are designed for continuous delivery. Any failure, either in infrastructure or security, can disrupt this flow. Having a fault tolerance mechanism in place enables operational continuity and secure deployment. With orchestration, IT operators can define fault tolerance policies as code to enable consistent and repeatable responses to failures of any kind. This includes redundant components and failover mechanisms to help deliver continuous operation despite individual component failures.
Backend and Backstage: What Orchestration Solves
While orchestration solves numerous issues, I’m listing two situations that have constantly come up in my conversations with stakeholders. I can safely say these two events mimic and consolidate most of the other use cases we have discussed in the context of orchestration.
When Vulnerabilities Strike
Vulnerabilities are like glitches that happen on stage: unexpected and disruptive. When a security vulnerability emerges, a manual response involves multiple time-consuming steps, from auditing infrastructure and determining impact to creating remediation plans and executing fixes. Each step is executed individually, not necessarily automatically, in parallel or in time.
Orchestration acts like a stage manager, giving ITOps the flexibility to define the set of actions in code, automate their execution and remediate the vulnerabilities without manual interdependencies. Not only is the response faster, but it also enables operations to target specific nodes in whichever manner they require at whatever time they need.
When You Need to Control Your Rollouts
A similar parallel can be drawn while performing controlled rollouts. Orchestration solutions can be employed to:
- Identify infected nodes automatically
- Target those specific nodes for remediation
- Schedule deployments based on pre-defined conditions
- Apply changes in batches to minimize disruption and complete the rollout
Building Your Orchestration Strategy
To implement an effective job orchestration in your environment:
- Define clear workflows: Document your workflows and separate them into logical phases. Each event or incident has a set of workflows that must be strung together. You, as ITOps, must be able to define these workflows and the steps involved with clarity.
- Adopt an “as-code” approach: Define workflows programmatically to maintain consistency and enable collaboration. Coding the execution of the workflows gives you greater flexibility and control over how and even when to do so. The “as-code” approach creates a common framework across teams for greater collaboration.
- Prioritize scalability: A key capability is that your orchestration platform can handle growth across teams, platforms and architectures. Orchestrating a set of workflows across ten nodes is good, but can you scale it across 10,000 nodes?
- Integrate security: Embed security checks throughout your orchestration workflows. Security can never be an afterthought. ITOps must embed security into every step of the workflow execution process. Multiple layers of security can help make your workflows formidable and keep vulnerabilities at bay.
- Design for failure: Assume that an instrument will fail. Do you have a backup? Assume that the main artist is going to come in late. Do you have a fill-in singer? In short, assume things will fail and build contingencies into orchestration.
- Promote visibility: With multiple teams collaborating, it is paramount that you have a consolidated view of what is going on. Whether it’s a music festival or a DevSecOps workflow, choose tools that provide monitoring capabilities and transparency for stakeholders.
The Future of Orchestration
Whether you’re managing a festival with 250,000 attendees or an enterprise IT environment with thousands of nodes, the principle remains the same: success depends not just on doing things right, but doing them in the right order, at the right time and with the ability to adapt to changing conditions.
Smart orchestration is what keeps the show running smoothly and the audience coming back for more.
From what I see with our customers, old and new, IT environments continue to grow in complexity. Orchestration has and will become increasingly critical. The most successful organizations will be those that invest in the right orchestration platforms. This will help them excel in automating individual tasks and seamlessly coordinating complex workflows across diverse systems.
And as an ending note, I foresee a future where orchestration will be driven primarily by AI agents, with humans stepping in to make judgment-based decisions.
