Orchestration (computers)

Orchestration describes the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of complex computer systems, middleware, and services.

It is often discussed as having an inherent intelligence (trait) or even implicitly autonomic control, but those are largely aspirations or analogies rather than technical descriptions. In reality, "orchestration" is largely the effect of automation or systems deploying elements of control theory.

This usage of "orchestration" is often discussed in the context of virtualization, provisioning, and dynamic datacenter topics. It is often used as a buzzword.

A somewhat different usage relates to the process of coordinating an exchange of information through web service interactions. (See also service-oriented architecture).

Examples

* [http://www.activevos.com/products-activevos.php ActiveVOS] is built on the BPEL, BPEL4People and WS-Human Task open standards to allow developers the ability to orchestrate various systems and services.
* [http://ode.apache.org/ Apache ODE] (Orchestration Director Engine) is a WS-BPEL 1.1 and 2.0 compliant business process management (BPM) engine that supports two communication layers: one based on Axis2 (Web Services http transport) and another one based on the JBI standard (using Apache ServiceMix). It is capable of Hot-deployment, and features a management interface for processes, instances, and messages.
* [http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/bpel/index.html Oracle BPEL Process Manager] provides a framework for easily designing, deploying, monitoring, and administering processes based on BPEL standards. BPEL Process Manager is the service orchestration solution on Oracle's SOA Suite.
* [http://www.intervoice.com/index.php/prod_media_exchange.html Intervoice Media Exchange] contains an orchestration engine that has been designed to initiate and manage media interactions. It is the industry's first commercially available product that has implemented State Chart eXtensible Markup Language (SCXML) as the framework for building complex multi-modal interactions.
* [http://www.tibco.com/software/application_integration/businessworks/default.jsp TIBCO BusinessWorks] is a very functional orchestration, integration and transformation tool that supports BPEL, Web Services, common integration activities and visual modeling of orchestration processes.
* Microsoft BizTalk Server contains an orchestration engine often used for business process management (BPM), allowing developers to quickly orchestrate complex business processes involving multiple disparate systems.
* [http://www.netbeans.org/products/enterprise/ NetBeans Enterprise Pack] is an open-source SOA tool that contains a BPEL visual designer and runtime that allows users to orchestrate Web Services.
* The Orc language is an academic language for describing and implementing orchestrations.