Why Do You Need a Platform Orchestrator?

Understanding Platform Orchestrators

Platform orchestrators are software tools that automate the management and provisioning of infrastructure for software development. They act as a critical aspect of IDPs, significantly enhancing self-service capabilities, and can be used to describe specifications that workloads need to run successfully. Using these workload specifications, developers can dynamically create configurations and deploy workloads with all their dependencies to any environment. This means a streamlined development process and reduced errors.

In a nutshell, platform orchestrators give developers and operations teams the tools to coordinate application deployment across diverse environments, from development and testing to production.

How Platform Orchestrators Work

Platform orchestrators operate by providing a centralized workload-centric development interface for developers and operations teams to specify context, manage, and deploy applications across different environments. It operates in four stages:

• Read: The orchestrator retrieves the workload specification, which serves as a blueprint for the application’s requirements.
• Match: The orchestrator considers the deployment context and the baseline configurations set by the operations team. This means understanding where the application will be deployed and the relevant configurations for that specific environment.
• Create: Based on the workload specification and the matched context, the orchestrator creates the necessary infrastructure configuration files. It might leverage pre-defined templates or dynamically generate them based on the gathered information.
• Deploy: The orchestrator creates or updates the infrastructure needed for the application and then deploys the application itself. If the orchestrator’s role is limited to creating configuration files, then once those files are ready, it hands off the deployment to a dedicated continuous delivery (CD) tool.

Their Role in Software Development

Platform orchestrators address several common challenges in software development and deployment. Here are some of the key ones:

• Manual configuration errors: Without a platform orchestrator, configuration management requires manual labor workflow, which is time-consuming and prone to human error. Automating the configurations reduces the possibility of infrastructure failures and scales more efficiently.
• Inconsistent environments: When working with too many disparate tools, standardization across teams is essential to ensure that applications behave as expected from development to production.
• Complexity management: Tools like Kubernetes often introduce complex workflows that require some expertise to manage. Platform orchestrators significantly reduce the complex tasks developers encounter in their workflows by providing a unified interface and automating the deployment and management of infrastructure.
• Developer productivity: Managing and provisioning development infrastructure in different tools and platforms often causes delays and inefficiencies, affecting developer experience. Platform orchestrators can then speed up response time and streamline the deployment and management process through automation.

Key Advantages

Platform orchestrators offer a powerful set of benefits for developers, platform engineering, and DevOps teams.

• Platform orchestrators take the complexity out of application lifecycle management, turning it into a clear and manageable process. They handle everything from the initial creation of an application to its eventual decommissioning, including version control and production monitoring.
• Their core function of automating individual tasks and deployments in a smooth and controlled manner is important for maintaining the integrity and stability of production systems. Platform orchestrators leverage automation solutions to streamline CI/CD processes. This automation ranges from source code management to final deployment through automated testing and continuous integration, which are key elements for fast and efficient software delivery.
• Platform orchestrators also promote collaboration and knowledge sharing among platform teams. Profiles created within the platform allow developers to share best practices across teams and workloads. This fosters consistency without imposing rigid restrictions, enabling teams to leverage each other’s expertise while maintaining flexibility.
• Platform orchestration takes repetitive tasks off developers’ plates, increasing their productivity and ensuring faster time to market. Developer teams can easily speed up release cycles and deploy new features more frequently, all while maintaining high-quality standards.

How Platform Orchestrators and IDPs Work Together

While IDPs and platform orchestrators aim to improve the software development lifecycle, they serve distinct purposes.

An IDP is a comprehensive suite that provides developers with self-service capabilities. These platforms comprise features like CI/CD pipelines, real-time monitoring, and logging, all customized to fit your organization’s needs perfectly. They build upon the platform orchestrator’s functionalities of integrating and automating all the essential infrastructure components to deliver a user-friendly interface with additional developer features.

On the other hand, the platform orchestrator handles the heavy lifting of infrastructure management. While it doesn’t directly offer the high-level tools and services you find in an IDP, it enables platform engineers to weave various tools and services into a cohesive platform seamlessly.

Thus, the platform orchestrator provides the underlying structure while the IDP builds upon it. They work together to provide developers with a feature-rich and user-friendly environment.

An example of a platform orchestrator is Mia-Platform Console. It facilitates the orchestration of application deployments across different environments, ensuring seamless transitions. It also manages the entire application lifecycle, from its creation to its eventual decommissioning.

Summing Up

Platform orchestrators have gained popularity in recent years. They help engineering teams by automating and standardizing application deployment and management. These benefits create a smoother developer experience and reduce the possibility of human error. By abstracting away complexity, platform orchestrators eliminate the need for static setups and manual processes.

If you’d like to explore this further in the context of platforms, this whitepaper on Why and how to evolve into a platform company is a good place to start.