Cisco Cisco Tidal Enterprise Orchestrator Adapter for Windows Server Livre blanc
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Technical White Paper
Perform Service-Oriented Orchestration with Cisco
Process Orchestrator
Process Orchestrator
What You Will Learn
Cisco
®
Process Orchestrator 3.0 introduces a new feature set that provides service-oriented orchestration and
enables a shift away from traditional run-book automation and IT process automation. With this new approach,
automation aligns with the high-level services provided by IT and models the way that a high-level service is
supported by a topology of lower-level services, systems, and devices. Planning for services and their desired
states is the initial step in automation design. The next step is definition of process actions for these services and
then implementation of specific process workflows that traverse these services to act on lower-level elements.
This enables a declarative approach to automation, focusing on the result desired rather than how it is achieved.
The capabilities augment and complement traditional orchestration definitions and approaches, so that Cisco
Process Orchestrator provides both service-oriented and process-based orchestration. This document focuses on
the incremental, differentiated capabilities that service-oriented orchestration adds to Cisco Process Orchestrator.
Overview
Cisco Process Orchestrator is an advanced orchestration engine belonging to the run-book automation (RBA) or IT
process automation (ITPA) class of products. Traditionally, tools in this category focus on a sequence of IT
processes that implement automation. The process is the focal point of automation. Processes act on lower-level
IT elements such as devices, servers, and specific tools. The set of elements on which automation acts is typically
delivered in the product through adapters connecting to various layers of the IT technology stack. IT, however,
focuses on services that provide value to the business, which are much higher in the stack. The inability of RBA
and ITPA tools to act on the business-level services in the environment becomes an inhibitor to delivery and
creates a poor abstraction for users.
Service-oriented orchestration provides the agility to model and act on IT services. These features make creation
of orchestration active and dynamic and allow new, higher-level services to be defined in the system and deployed
quickly. After new types of services are defined, the organization can create instances of those new services.
Using events, automation can detect patterns in these services, enabling policy-based automation.