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What is cloud orchestration?

Iman Tabrizian

iman.tabrizian@gmail.com

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Outline

  • Introduction
    • Preliminaries
    • Cloud Automation
    • Challenges
    • Approaches
  • Tools
    • Cloud Orchestrators
  • Conclusion

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What does “Orchestration” mean?

  • orchestration (noun) the arrangement or scoring of music for orchestral performance.
  • orchestration (noun) the planning or coordination of the elements of a situation to produce a desired effect, especially surreptitiously.

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What is “Cloud Computing”?

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing.

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Figure 1 - Hypervisor

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Figure 2 - Crucial part in cloud computing required for Cloud Orchestration

Request For a virtual machine with detailed specification

REST API

Hypervisor allocates resources

1 GB RAM

2 CPU Cores

1 NIC

...

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What is “Cloud Orchestration”?

Cloud orchestration is the use of programming technology to manage the interconnections and interactions among workloads on public and private cloud infrastructure.

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Cloud Automation

Automation focuses on making one task repeatable rapidly with minimal operator intervention.

  • Eases large-scale deployments

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Why does cloud orchestration matter?

  • Multi-cloud deployment has become inevitable
  • Configuring infrastructure at scale is daunting
    • Install MongoDB on 10 server one by one and cluster them.
  • State management and scalability

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Approaches to Cloud Orchestration

  • REST API
  • Infrastructure as Code (More common)

Infrastructure Definition file

REST API Calls

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Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

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Infrastructure as Code

  • AWS CloudFormation
  • HOT (Heat Orchestration Template)
  • TOSCA

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IaC - AWS CloudFormation

  • Used for Amazon Web Services
  • CLI, web interface, API
  • JSON and YAML are supported
  • Updating Stacks

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Figure 4 - AWS CloudFormation Hello World

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IaC - HOT

  • OpenStack Heat Orchestration Template
  • Presented in YAML format
  • Replacing CloudFormation compatible format for OpenStack

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Figure 5 - HOT orchestration template

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TOSCA

  • Specification intended to support multiple cloud platforms
  • Standardized specification of applications
  • Widely supported
    • OpenStack Heat
    • Cloudify

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Figure 6 - TOSCA Specification

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Configuration Management

Configuration management (CM) refers to the process of systematically handling changes to a system in a way that it maintains integrity over time.

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Configuration Management Tools

  • Infrastructure Complexity
  • Learning Curve
  • Cost
  • Community and Support

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Configuration Management Tools

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Ansible

Puppet

Chef

Script Language

YAML

Custom DSL based on Ruby

Ruby

Requires specialized software for nodes

No

Yes

Yes

Provides centralized point of control

No. Any computer can be a controller

Yes, via Puppet Master

Yes, via Chef Server

Task Execution Order

Sequential

Non-Sequential

Sequential

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Bonus!

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Genorch!

  • A generic orchestration platform (multiple cloud support)
  • Uses ansible for configuration management
  • Monitoring using Prometheus
  • Completely open source

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Figure 7 - Genorch Hello World (I)

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Figure 8 - Genorch Hello World (II)

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Genorch Contribution

  • Adding more drivers other than OpenStack
  • Improve the speed by parallelization
  • Better output logs
  • ….

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References

  • aws.amazon.com/cloudformation (CloudFormation)
  • www.oasis-open.org/committees/tosca/ (OASIS TOSCA)
  • docs.openstack.org/heat/latest/template_guide/hot_spec.html (HOT specification)�

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Thanks!

iman.tabrizian@gmail.com

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