Orchestrating & Scheduling Tools
Orchestration and scheduling tools strive to eliminate silos, streamline processes and automate repetitive tasks so that IT departments can move quickly and efficiently. While similar to automation, orchestration goes beyond the scope of automation by focusing on workflows or processes rather than simple tasks. For example, orchestrating an application means not just deploying the app, but also connecting it to the network.
In the past few years, containers have dramatically changed the way software organizations build, ship, and maintain applications. Container orchestration tools are concerned with managing the life cycles of those containers, and aim to automate the deployment, management, scaling, networking, and availability of container-based applications.
What are Orchestration and Scheduling Tools?
Orchestration and scheduling tools are a broad category that span everything from simple script-based application deployment tools to specialized container orchestration solutions like Kubernetes. Most orchestration products are quite complex and have to interact with many different systems, which can make integrating everything a chore. In addition, they tend to have convoluted price models that start with a cheap base, but become pricey quickly due to plug-ins and add-ons that must be included to get all the functionality.
Aside from price, you should consider the following factors carefully before choosing an orchestration tool:
1. Your organization and IT deployment size: This is especially important when taking into consideration licensing levels.
2. Your operating system: Windows-based products work best with Windows operating systems. It might make sense to choose a tool that is inherently compatible with your organization.
3. Open source vs. commercial: Support is usually a key differentiator here. Open source products often rely on community support, while commercial products have assigned experts that are nice to have for critical business systems.
Benefits of Orchestration and Scheduling Tools:
Orchestration and scheduling tools streamline and simplify interconnected workloads, repeatable processes, and operations between complex distributed systems. They help to deliver highly available, dynamically scaling, and high-performance applications.
By allowing users to create and execute predictable, repeatable, automated processes, orchestration tools confer benefits like:
1. Reduced IT costs
2. Reduced errors
3. Increased productivity
4. Saved developer time
5. Faster operations
6. Minimized system outages
7. Limited downtime
