The definition of Orchestration is evolving very fast. Now Orchestration means the discipline of automated, self-service, resource provisioning, on-boarding and management with process, policy, governance and security. Prior to this, Orchestration merely meant harmonizing ensemble of formerly discrete functions – provisioning computing instances or network resources in automated fashion; onboarding of workload or management of those activities. Inadvertantly server instances meant homogeneous cloud server instances.

Over the past year, the demand for multi-cloud orchestration capability has increased. First, there were repeated outages of Amazon public cloud; the most widely used public cloud. Second, there has been a growing success of open source clouds. While building private clouds, Rightscale quotes that 41% of enterprises choose Open Source while 29% choose Open Source and VMware combined. In the case of public cloud adoption, 89% of enterprises choose a multi-cloud strategy.

Customers need a multi-cloud strategy for governance and risk requirement alone. It is no surprise that an existing cloud orchestration dashboard simply cannot support interfacing the heterogeneous nature of cloud infrastructure. They need southbound interface to multiple cloud infrastructures across multiple hypervisors. That will cover the first part for a multi-cloud strategy. As an example, an enterprise is ready to pay higher license fee for dependable robust hypervisor platform for production environment, but lesser fee for open source platform for disaster recovery. But IT manager needs a single unified view to manage the complete IT platform.

But the inadvertent question is how to support interoperability across multi-cloud infrastructure. It will be surprising if enterprises are satisfied using different cloud infrastructure as siloes for different business units. Very soon they will realize what type of cloud is fit or unfit for different applications, and they will need the flexibility to shuffle around those environment. Continuously shuffling servers around the data center environment sounded very futuristic in the physical data center world, however, it is very practical in the cloud-based data center model. Hosting server images will no longer be a one-time event; rather it will be standard operating procedure for IT administration in next generation cloud-centric Enterprise IT.

As an example, a large global firm may adopt many regional cloud vendors for their seasonal marketing campaign across diverse geographical centers, but they would like to consolidate to a central or distributed cloud environment for financial and regulatory needs after the campaign is over. As cloud orchestration will be the essential ingredient for IT Service Management; handling migration around multi-cloud environments will be unavoidable for Cloud Orchestration.