The rise of platform orchestration: revolutionizing software development 

In the rapidly evolving landscape of cloud computing, platform orchestration is emerging as a transformative force, promising to redefine how industries approach software development.  

As businesses contend with the complexities of cloud-native environments, the demand for more efficient and standardized solutions has skyrocketed.  

Enter: platform orchestration. 💪

A methodology poised to tackle these challenges by automating infrastructure management and fostering seamless development workflows.  

The increasing emphasis on platform engineering heralds a new generation of tools extending beyond traditional Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings.

These tools provide published contracts between developers and platform teams, spanning cloud environments, databases, and more.  

This shift aims to alleviate the burden on developers who have long struggled with cumbersome infrastructure management, configuration inconsistencies, and error-prone workflows.

In this blog, we’ll delve into platform orchestration, exploring its workings, significance, and how it harmonizes with internal developer platforms (IDPs) to drive innovation. 

What is platform orchestration? 

Platform orchestration is the automation of infrastructure provisioning and management for application development, testing, and quality assurance. This encompasses applications, configurations, pipelines, databases, and policies.

By automating these processes and ensuring compliance through infrastructure as code (IaC) and policy as code, platform orchestration eliminates repetition, reduces cognitive load, and safeguards against inconsistencies and errors.  

Developers are empowered to work autonomously, free from delays related to manual provisioning, ensuring secure and compliant environments. 

The term “platform orchestration” itself is often misunderstood. Rather than controlling every aspect of an internal developer platform (IDP), it facilitates self-service actions within these platforms, utilizing tools and APIs integral to their operation.  

Gartner aptly labels this category as “Self-Service Environment Management,” reflecting its focus on setting up environments within IDPs.  

How platform orchestrators work 

Platform orchestrators automate infrastructure management, providing a centralized interface for specifying, managing, and deploying applications across various environments.

They function in four stages: 

1. Read: The orchestrator extracts workload specifications serving as blueprints for application requirements. 

2. Match: It evaluates the deployment context and aligns it with baseline configurations determined by operations teams, tailoring environments to their needs. 

3. Create: Utilizing specifications and contextual data, the orchestrator generates necessary infrastructure configuration files, dynamically adjusting settings as required. 

4. Deploy: The orchestrator establishes the infrastructure and deploys applications, potentially leveraging a continuous delivery (CD) tool for file configuration and application deployment. 

These stages streamline software development by mitigating human errors, enhancing deployment efficiency, and maintaining consistency. 

Their role in software development 

Platform orchestrators address key challenges in software development:  

• Eliminating manual errors: automation minimizes human errors, ensuring more stable and reliable systems. 

• Standardization across environments: by unifying disparate tools, orchestrators ensure applications perform consistently from development through production. 

• Managing complexity: they simplify workflows even when using complex tools like Kubernetes, offering a cohesive interface for infrastructure management. 

• Boosting developer productivity: orchestration reduces delays caused by multi-platform management, promoting a seamless and efficient development process. 

Why is platform orchestration needed? 

Without platform orchestration, developers and DevOps teams often establish environments independently, resulting in unique setups—or “snowflakes”—lacking uniformity.  

This approach leads to security risks, compliance issues, and increased costs due to inefficient configurations.

Furthermore, the inconsistency burdened developers with excessive cognitive load and poor user experiences. 

Platform orchestration addresses these challenges by creating standardized, efficient and uniform environments, ensuring policy compliance, and improving the developer experience by enabling “golden paths.”

By automating repeated tasks, platform orchestration offers better governance and shields developers from underlying complexities. 

Benefits of platform orchestration 

Platform orchestration offers a wide range of advantages, significantly enhancing the efficiency and productivity of developers, platform engineering teams, and DevOps professionals.  

1. Reusable code blueprints: by creating a one-time, as-code blueprint covering configurations and policies, platform orchestration enables developers to reuse these blueprints seamlessly. This approach eliminates the redundancy of setting up environments from scratch, promoting faster and error-free development cycles. 

2. Reduced setup time: developers no longer have to wait for ticket-based approvals to set up environments, as platform orchestrators automate this process. This elimination of delays allows developers to focus on innovation and coding rather than administrative tasks. 

3. Compliance and standards: platform orchestrators ensure all environments adhere to established policies and standards, thereby avoiding issues related to production readiness, application security, and potential cost overruns. This results in secure and compliant environments, crucial for containerized, cloud-native applications. 

4. Streamlined testing environments: setting up testing environments becomes a straightforward task, leading to improved software development quality. The orchestrated setup provides “paved roads” for developers, facilitating self-service options without compromising security or standards. 

5. Dynamic environment configuration: beyond mere environment creation, platform orchestrators can adjust configurations based on specific requirements, such as deploying a larger database when needed. This adaptability ensures that infrastructure aligns with the workload demands. 

6. Lifecycle management: platform orchestrators simplify application lifecycle management from initial creation to decommissioning, covering tasks such as version control and production monitoring.  

7. Enhanced CI/CD automation: by automating individual tasks and workflows, platform orchestrators maintain the integrity and stability of production systems, streamlining CI/CD processes—from source code management to final deployment. This holistic automation ensures fast, efficient software delivery. 

8. Collaboration and knowledge sharing: platform orchestrators encourage collaboration by allowing developers to create profiles and share best practices across teams. This fosters a consistent development approach while maintaining flexibility and leveraging collective expertise. 

9. Improved developer productivity: automation of repetitive tasks allows developers to allocate more time to critical development activities. As a result, teams can accelerate release cycles, implement new features more frequently, and uphold high-quality standards across projects. 

By implementing platform orchestration, organizations can optimize their software development processes, achieving faster time to market and driving innovative solutions efficiently.  

The problems platform orchestration solves 

Platform orchestration addresses: 

• Inconsistent tooling: it standardizes tool usage across teams, eliminating redundancies and inconsistencies. 

• Manual infrastructure configuration: automation replaces human effort, minimizing errors and improving scalability. 

• Complex building and provisioning: developers can easily build and deploy applications, even without deep knowledge of technologies like Kubernetes. 

• Low developer productivity: by reducing the need to work across multiple platforms, it mitigates inefficiencies and delays. 

• Configuration drift: ensuring standardized git workflows enhances alignment between actual and desired infrastructure states. 

• Limited container visibility: orchestration improves visibility into container health and status, optimizing operations. 

How platform orchestrators and IDPs work together 

Platform orchestrators and internal developer platforms (IDPs) both improve the software development lifecycle but serve distinct roles. An IDP offers developers a suite of self-service tools like CI/CD pipelines and monitoring, while the orchestrator focuses on infrastructure management.  

Orchestrators provide the necessary infrastructure configuration, and IDPs utilize this foundation to deliver additional developer-centric tools and services.

Together, they form an integrated environment that enhances the efficiency and experience of development teams, offering a seamless blend of infrastructure and application management. 

Conclusion 

Platform orchestration is revolutionizing software development and infrastructure management. By automating complex tasks and integrating disparate systems, it delivers a streamlined, efficient, and standardized approach to environment creation and management. This not only simplifies the lives of developers and operations teams but also ensures compliance, enhances productivity, and reduces software delivery timelines. 

By collaborating closely with internal developer platforms, platform orchestrators provide a robust framework for modern development environments, ultimately driving industry-wide innovation and efficiency. As we navigate the complexities of cloud-native ecosystems, platform orchestration’s role as a game-changer cannot be understated—it’s time the industry embraced this paradigm shift.