A discussion from the Intel Developer Forum where we cover:

Billy Cox said most definitely, with a new focus on the data center more so than speeds and feeds.

It’s the convergence that’s apparent and that is leading to new views about orchestration as illustrated in Google Kubernetes.

But the term “orchestration” is used and abused. There are various levels of orchestration that are important. Networking and orchestration, for example, have different forms of orchestration.

McAfee, for example, now has Intel NSX control that provides app protection, something that is not capable without network level orchestration.

The software defined story is a crucial part of the automation. It’s now important to call physical resources with software. It is why Google Kubernetes is so interesting as one aspect of the management layer.

But the term orchestration is used and abused.

It is important to talk about orchestration for software networking, storage, etc.

Orchestration to me is not just lights out, it’s people gone.

But containers are not the only answer. There are billions of virtual machines and that’s not going to change. Still, there is this emerging confusing mix of VMs and containers. Some form of orchestration is needed to do the work.

What you can do is standardize what you expose. This is increasingly important as IT gets more accustomed with programming the infrastructure with APIs. Servers can be configured based on performance goals.

Now comes the question: Does an Amazon customer want that level of access or is that optimization offers as a service? More so, it is a balance of what detail to expose.