5 ways Platform Orchestration helps you become more Service-Oriented

Infrastructure & Operations is evolving and modernising; IT now, more than ever, has to move away from being infrastructure-oriented to being service-oriented; governing and orchestrating services across increasingly complex hybrid IT estates.

Benefits of a service-oriented architecture

A service-oriented architecture allows you to treat every software or infrastructure component independent of the service that requires those components. 

These components are reusable and composable, and therefore can be shared between different services with a number of benefits such as scalability and cost reduction.

Importantly, it switches the IT ethos of a company away from the individual technologies it operates and towards how to more effectively use those technologies to deliver the services needed by developers, and therefore the products they deliver to customers. 

To make development even easier, organisations often build platforms of commonly combined services for developers to build upon. 

As ever, complexity and governance is a challenge.

What is platform orchestration?

The shift towards cloud and services has made developers masters of their own kingdoms when it comes to technology stacks and tool choice. This can mean that there are hundreds of different tools in use in just one organisation.

Platforms help to contain this sprawl by providing not only core computing, storage, and networking capabilities, but also an agreed suite of tools for building and delivering services. This has additional benefits for agility, security, and cost, because developers can build without having to worry about provisioning infrastructure or the nuances of security. 

Platform orchestration integrates core enterprise services within and between different technology platforms, and is a key component of the shift from technology-oriented architecture to service-oriented architecture.

Here’s 5 ways Platform Orchestration can help make complex IT environments more service-oriented:

1. Enable composability

Platform orchestrators, like digital platform conductors, provide a single layer for integrations. This means new software can be connected to legacy systems and data sources, allowing teams to quickly build new services and capabilities with real-time adaptability and resilience. 

2. Deliver efficient any-scale operations

Scale comes with costs, especially in complex technology environments. Platform orchestrators can use automation to manage scale, and ensure hybrid technology environments scale efficiently to support operations. 

3. Create a more adaptable workforce with automation

Use platform orchestration to codify processes into policies and use automation to structure activities so they can be seamlessly passed between human and digital workers, allowing humans to focus on service design and delivery. 

4. Increase speed to value with dynamic observability

Platform orchestrators allow continuous insight into activities, so processes can be monitored, adapted and recovered in real-time, improving customer experience and service design. 

5. Accelerate anything digital 

As organisations become more service oriented than technology oriented, service delivery will become a blend of human and digital. Platform orchestration brings agility and resilience to the digital platform, so humans can focus on delivery.

Beyond platform orchestration

Service and platform orchestration face challenges because full lifecycle management in complex hybrid IT is complex. You need to consider CI/CD, resource utilisation and infrastructure choices for Day-0, Day-1 and Day-2 operations, as well as resilience, governance and cost. 

This requires teams with these types of estates to think bigger than platforms and to think about environments. 

These environments can be expressed as code, providing a single control plane through which teams can govern and orchestrate services across their legacy and cloud-native environments. This has particular benefits for teams with large on-prem estates which may not be compatible with modern automation and addresses the interoperability, monitoring and governance pain-points of multi-cloud.

Download the guide to environment-as-code, or explore different use cases.