Gartner Hype Cycle for Compute: Cloudsoft named in brand new Infrastructure Orchestration category

The Gartner Hype Cycle for Compute was released earlier this week, and describes the 25 most-hyped innovations in the compute market.

For each of these technologies, Gartner’s Analysts define and analyse the benefit to enterprises, the current maturity and market penetration of those technologies. They advise Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders to “use this research to determine whether and/or when to invest in these innovations”.

Cloudsoft is delighted to have been named as a representative vendor in the brand new category of Infrastructure Orchestration! 

Gartner clients can read the full report here (skip to page 15 for Infrastructure Orchestration), but we have summarised it below for non-Gartner clients. 

What’s in the report?

Gartner Analyst Chris Saunderson gives Infrastructure Orchestration a Benefit Rating of High and a Maturity rating of Emerging. Gartner predict that Infrastructure Orchestration will reach it’s ‘Plateau of Productivity’ (aka, wide adoption) in the next 2-5 years, so early adopters will quickly reap the benefits ahead of competitors who lag behind. 

Infrastructure orchestration is more than just infrastructure automation. It allows for 

the design, delivery and operation of services across on-premises, cloud and edge 

Deployments.

- Gartner Hype Cycle for Compute, 2023

What can I do with Infrastructure Orchestration?

1. Automate across (and between) any infrastructure environment:
   Infrastructure Orchestration enables platform and I&O teams to design, deliver, operate and ensure orchestrated services across the full spectrum of environments; whether it be cloud, on-prem or edge. 
2. Self-service, full-lifecycle orchestration
   Infrastructure Orchestration enables templated service creation and management, spanning provisioning, Day-2 operations, and integration with CI/CD, self-service portals, and API access to orchestrated services. 
1. Simplify ongoing maintenance in complex infrastructure environments
   Infrastructure Orchestration provides strategic workflow capabilities to drive lifecycle delivery and ongoing maintenance of complex deployed infrastructure. 
2. Agile automation
   Infrastructure Orchestration practices and tools enable agile, iterative automation delivery and execution of the processes required via self-service and API access. 
3. Improve visibility, reduce human error
   Infrastructure Orchestration investment improves the agility and visibility of service delivery and reduces inconsistencies from manual activities. 

The benefits of Infrastructure Orchestration

• Improved engineers’ experience for deploying and managing infrastructure
• Reducing toil by reducing manual effort to deliver infrastructure
• Improving system reliability, by embedding security and compliance requirements into the delivered services
• Cost optimisation opportunities, through more efficient use of resources. 
• Modernise I&O teams by enabling an automation-first focus.
• Scale automation efforts to meet business demands. 

What’s driving the need for Infrastructure Orchestration?

According to Gartner, there are six key drivers for organisations to implement Infrastructure Orchestration.

1. Improving business agility
   Agility is essential for businesses to be able to quickly respond to changing customer needs, as well as market and technology changes, by delivering the right products quickly.
   
   
2. Cost optimisation and operational efficiency
   Orchestration enables infrastructure teams to deliver scalable, reliable and secure platforms. This helps to drive operational efficiency, reduce human work and toil, and also reduce costs from downtime. 
   
   
3. Extracting greater value from existing tooling
   Infrastructure teams may leverage a number of point solutions for different infrastructure management tasks. Infrastructure orchestration helps to unlock additional value from the automation tools already implemented, enabling richer automation of incident response, request servicing etc.
   
   
4. Scaling DevOps
   One of the goals of DevOps is continuous software delivery. Infrastructure Orchestration is an enabler of this, allowing DevOps teams to automate the provisioning and management of environments. 
   
   
5. Growing infrastructure complexity
   Software is now deployed into increasingly complex environments, and these require greater automation. This will support improvements to the consumability of infrastructure (self-service and approved) as well as the ongoing maintenance of deployments.
   
   
6. Improving security and compliance posture
   Avoid audit failures and get end-to-end visibility and traceability of provisioning and configuration with continuous compliance automation for infrastructure. 

What’s getting in the way of implementing Infrastructure Orchestration?

There are three things holding organisations back when it comes to Infrastructure Orchestration:

• Skills around automation and orchestration can be challenging to find in I&O teams, as it falls outwith their traditional skillset. 
• I&O operating models are traditionally centred on domain specialisation. These skills silos can make it hard to develop and deliver end-to-end services through orchestration.
• Automation initiatives may not yet be mature enough for orchestration, as orchestration requires that automation tasks are there to be orchestrated. 

How does Cloudsoft AMP help with Infrastructure Orchestration?

Cloudsoft AMP is infrastructure-independent and can orchestrate environments across private clouds, public clouds, on-prem and container platforms.

This means AMP will not add to infrastructure complexity; instead it provides control and end-to-end visibility, whilst maximising value from existing technology and tooling investments.

Cloudsoft AMP:

• Simplifies full lifecycle orchestration in complex environments; enabling engineers to attach automation anywhere across your tech stack.
• Codifies environments, policies, compliance, runbooks and more 'as-code' into reusable blueprints, reducing human error and improving operational efficiency and reducing toil.
• Improves reliability and compliance, by empowering infrastructure teams to automatically detect and resolve resilience and reliability challenges.

In addition to the Hype Cycle for Compute 2023, we were also named in the Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability, in the Digital Platform Conductor category, which Gartner clients can read here. 

You can watch a demo of Cloudsoft AMP here: 

And if you want to discover how AMP can enable Infrastructure Orchestration for you, book a chat with our team.