This is the fourth part of a 7-part series on the salient features that IT professionals should look for in high-performing IT infrastructure orchestration platforms for enterprise use cases.
Introduction
In today’s fast-paced digital world, IT orchestration plays a crucial role in managing complex IT environments. As businesses seek to stay competitive and agile, the adoption of orchestration platforms is becoming increasingly important. To maximize their usage, it is vital that these platforms are user-friendly and intuitive for both low-code users and coding experts. The ability to be adopted by a diverse user group is a key driving force to ensure that all organization members can harness the full potential of their IT teams. In this blog post, we will delve into how low-code GUIs and Orchestration as Code capabilities contribute to the overall ease of adoption in IT orchestration platforms.
TLDR:
Key Benefits of Ease of Adoption for IT Infrastructure Orchestration Platforms:
Simplified workflow creation for non-technical users
Flexibility and control for coding experts
Catering to diverse skill sets
Seamless integration and customization options
Empowering users to maximize automation potential
Low-Code Graphical User Interface (GUI) for Orchestration Platforms
A low-code GUI simplifies the process of creating and managing automation workflows by providing a visual, drag-and-drop interface for designing and configuring tasks. This approach enables faster development and deployment and significantly reduces the learning curve for non-technical users.
Key features of a low-code GUI in orchestration platforms include a drag-and-drop workflow designer, pre-built templates and components, and a visual representation of workflows and dependencies. These features empower non-technical users to actively contribute to automation efforts, freeing up coding experts to focus on more complex tasks. Additionally, a low-code GUI encourages collaboration between technical and non-technical team members, fostering a more efficient and cohesive IT team.
Orchestration as Code for Orchestration Platforms
Orchestration as Code is a powerful approach that allows automation workflows to be defined, managed, and version-controlled as code. This capability provides coding experts with the flexibility and control they need while also enabling code reuse and sharing across projects. Everything as Code has become a moniker for the growing list of as code solutions, including Infrastructure as Code, Configuration as Code, Policy as Code, Environments as Code, Security as Code, etc. But all of these terms are just ways of templating existing functions as code, and automating them. So for the focus of orchestrating an enterprise, the high level focus needs to be on Orchestration as Code.
Some essential Orchestration as Code features in orchestration platforms include support for popular scripting, protocols and programming languages, integration with code repositories and version control systems, full visibility into code behind the workflows, and template actions for quick and easy code generation. These features enable coding experts to fully leverage their skills in the automation process, provide transparency and visibility into automation workflows, and facilitate collaboration between coding experts and low-code users through shared templates and components.
Combining Low-Code GUI and Orchestration as Code in Orchestration Platforms
Catering to both low-code users and coding experts is vital for an IT orchestration platform. By ensuring that a wide range of skill sets can contribute to automation efforts, organizations can create a more collaborative and inclusive environment. This approach also promotes knowledge sharing among team members, leading to more efficient and effective IT operations.
When evaluating and selecting a platform that meets your organization’s needs, it’s important to consider the skills and expertise of your team, the platform’s integration capabilities and customization options, and the platform’s support for your organization’s IT environment, such as on-premises, hybrid cloud, or a fully cloud-based setup. As mentioned in our previous blog, integrations are important for being able to create operational orchestrations across your IT infrastructure. For customized enterprises, these integrations often end up being managed by coding experts with vast internal knowledge of the enterprise’s process. With the right orchestration platform, this internal knowledge should also be leverageable by low-code users to be able to quickly adopt new business and IT processes.
Conclusion
Ease of adoption is a critical factor in the success of an IT orchestration platform. By providing both low-code GUI and Orchestration as Code capabilities, these platforms empower a diverse range of users to contribute their skills and expertise to the organization’s automation efforts. As an industry leader and knowledge source, we strongly encourage IT decision-makers to carefully evaluate and select an orchestration platform that caters to their specific needs and allows their IT teams to excel in today’s competitive digital landscape.
In Part V of this series, we will look into the Importance of On-Prem/Hybrid Cloud for Orchestration Platforms, and how hybrid cloud capabilities give enterprises the ability to control their data, infrastructure, and costs.