Thursday, June 10, 2021

Need for an orchestrator

Most of my career was spent doing network devops for a software development company. Our mentality was, open source all the way and if we couldn't find a product that did what we wanted, we either developed it ourselves or expanded the capabilities of that software ourselves.

I started a new job and the decision was made to use an orchestrator. Ultimately it sounds cool and I can see a few usecases for it, but ultimately, I don't think the value it would bring alligns with the effort it would take to setup and actually build automations with.

I can essentially do everything the orchestrator can do in python, gitlab ci and ansible. An example could be using the orchestrator to make a simple API call is like a 40 step process in a gui that uses some weird programming language. We wouldn't be able to easily take the created api call out of the software and implement it anywhere else. Comparing that to writing a reusable python script to do the exact same thing will allow us to run it from anywhere, not tie us down to a proprietary software and allow us to easily manage and expand its capability.

Anyway, are you using a network orchestrator? If so, which one? And what do you find is useful about it?



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