Cloud Orchestration Buyers’ Guide 2025

State of the market: Cloud orchestration solutions enable you to coordinate how your organization’s cloud services operate and interact with one another. They can automate repetitive or complex cloud workflows to make your cloud environment more manageable, scalable, and cost-effective.

• The global cloud orchestration market was estimated at USD 13.9 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16% to reach a value of USD 45.8 billion by 2030.
• 92% of organizations are already hosting at least some of their IT environment in the cloud, and cloud spending is expected to surge globally by an average of 19% in 2025. Some countries are anticipating an even larger increase, such as the UK’s 31%.
• Despite this, 90% of IT decision makers have experienced obstacles with their cloud adoption over the past 12 months. The most common of these include controlling costs, security and compliance concerns, integration/migration challenges, and skills gaps.
• Cloud orchestration tools can help combat these challenges by making it easier to define and enforce security policies and set up integrations and automations in the cloud. This, in turn, saves labor and resource costs, freeing up finite IT and security resource.

Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading cloud orchestration platforms, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their orchestration and automation challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the cloud orchestration and wider cloud infrastructure space.

You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 guides to the best cloud orchestration products on the market in our IT Infrastructure Hub.

Our recommendations: Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your cloud orchestration implementation:

• For easier setup: Find a tool that offers as many pre-built integrations as possible with your existing environment.
• For maximum security: Consistency is key! Use the orchestration solution’s templates to apply security policies consistently across your entire cloud infrastructure.
• For maximum performance: Use your solution’s auto-scaling features to dynamically adjust the number of resources as needed. This ensures availability and reduces the costs associated with over- or under-provisioning.

How cloud orchestration works: Cloud orchestration solutions are typically deployed as cloud-based platforms that integrate with your existing cloud providers and other infrastructure-based tools.

Once deployed, cloud orchestration solutions use APIs provided by cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure) to create and manage resources. This allows them to support public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

With these integrations in place, you can use the orchestration tool’s template engine to describe your desired infrastructure and configurations. The way in which you do this will depend on which of two models your solution uses:

• With a declarative model, you define the end state you want to achieve within your environment, and the solution works out how to achieve it. 
• With an imperative model, you define the exact steps the solution should take to achieve the end state.

Once you’ve defined this end state, the solution takes the necessary actions needed to achieve it. These typically include:

• Automatically provisioning compute, storage, and networking resources according to your pre-defined templates or scripts.
• Integrating and linking different cloud services and managing the dependencies for those services. For example, deploying and configuring a database before deploying an application that’s going to use that database.
• Monitoring performance and resource usage across your environment (either using in-built capabilities or via integration with a third-party monitoring tool) and automatically scaling resources up or down as needed based on metrics like load, CPU utilization, memory usage, and network traffic.
• Automating complex workflows that involve lots of steps, such as deploying a new version of an application or rolling back a deployment.
• Automating event-driven workflows that respond to certain triggers in your cloud environment, such as traffic spikes or hardware failures.
• Automatically enforcing security, compliance, and operational policies, such as making sure you’re only using encrypted storage.

Some advanced orchestration solutions can also automatically identify and replace failing infrastructure components.

Benefits of cloud orchestration: There are four main benefits to implementing a cloud orchestration solution:

1. Utilize your resources more efficiently.
   • You can use a cloud orchestration tool to perform multiple tasks at the same time, both quickly and accurately. This saves time and human resource.
   • This helps address one of the most common challenges that organizations face when it comes to cloud adoption: the skills gap, or shortage.
   • The ability to manage multiple tasks at once without human interaction is where cloud orchestration differs to cloud automation, which typically refers to running a single task without human intervention. With orchestration, multiple automated workflows run in harmony, each dependent on the others.
2. Reduce costs.
   • Setting up integrations and automations in the cloud allows you to achieve more in the same time. It saves labor and resource costs as well as ensuring that you’re using your human power where it’s most needed and creating most value.
   • If your solution is able to identify and replace failing components, this can also help reduce costs associated with downtime.
3. Monitor, alert, and report on unexpected conditions.
   • Some cloud orchestration solutions offer their own in-built monitoring capabilities, but all of them integrate with other monitoring tools to track your resources’ performance, health, and logs. This can help you identify unexpected conditions that could indicate a compliance deviation or a breach of security.
   • Orchestration tools also help enforce security, compliance, and operational policies, and can take certain actions automatically to ensure adherence to those policies (e.g., automatically updating software and patching systems).
4. Improve your business agility.
   • With a cloud orchestration solution, you don’t need to build ad-hoc tools when new automations are required.
   • Instead, you can quickly deploy new servers, scale resources up or down automatically as needed, and easily implement new services and applications. 
   • This allows you to respond quickly to changes in your environment and outside of it.

Common cloud orchestration challenges: There are a few common challenges that you might come across when implementing a cloud orchestration solution. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:

1. Unsecure configurations can lead to potential vulnerabilities within your cloud environment. We recommend employing a standard, secure security configuration to all VMs to help reduce this risk. 
2. It can be complex to integrate a cloud orchestration solution with existing infrastructure and pipelines. We recommend choosing as solution that offers built-in integrations with as many of your existing tools as possible. Where native integrations don’t exist, make sure that your team are able to build custom ones. Some providers may even be able to help you with this. 
3. It can be a challenge to ensure consistency across different cloud deployments, configurations, security measures, and policies. This in turn can lead to security vulnerabilities, operational deficiencies, and failing dependencies. To avoid this, we recommend utilizing your tool’s template engine to define exactly how you want your environment set up. 
4. Cloud orchestration solutions can be costly. However, they can save you money in the long term by reducing labor costs, improving performance and efficiency, and saving you from having to continuously run cloud servers. If you’re considering implementing a cloud orchestration tool, it’s worth working out how much time and money it’s likely to save (or cost) you beforehand. 

Best cloud orchestration providers: Our team of software analysts and researchers has put together a shortlist of the best providers of cloud orchestration solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

• The Top 10 Cloud Orchestration Solutions
• The Top 7 Cloud Management Platforms
• The Top 8 Enterprise Architecture Tools
• The Top 12 Cloud Migration Solutions
• The Top 10 Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service Solutions

Features checklist: When comparing cloud orchestration solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

1. Resource orchestration: Your solution should enable you to efficiently allocate and coordinate your cloud resources, manage their availability, and optimize them. 
2. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud support: Your solution should support multiple cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP). This will allow you to work with the best infrastructure components on the market, rather than being boxed into products from one provider.
3. Workflow automation: The solution should automate multi-step processes such as deployments, updates, and rollbacks. To help you set this up, it should offer a template engine that allows you to define consistent cloud deployments and configurations. It should also track any changes to these templates or configurations for rollback and auditing purposes.
4. Dependency management: The solution should provision and configure resources in the correct sequence, based on their dependencies (e.g., it should set up a network before a VM).
5. Monitoring and logging: You should be able to access real-time reports into your environment’s performance and its error logs. The best tools also offer in-built monitoring capabilities or integrations with popular cloud security monitoring tools. 
6. Security and compliance: The solution should enforce policies to help you secure your data and ensure compliance with data protection standards such as GDPR and HIPAA. These policies could include encryption, IAM roles, and access controls.
7. Integrations: You solution should offer a variety of pre-built integrations and allow you to create additional configurations via API if required.
8. Dynamic scaling and balancing: Your solution should scale your cloud capacity up or down automatically as your organization grows or experiences peaks and troughs, and it should support your environment at the same standard, no matter its size.
9. Cost optimization: Your solution should provide insights into resource usage and costs to help prevent over-provisioning.
10. Self-healing: Some cloud orchestrations solutions automatically detect and resolve failures, such as replacing failed resources or restarting failed services. 

Further reading: You can find all our articles on cloud orchestration in our IT Infrastructure Hub.

Want to jump straight in? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy: 

• Shortlist: The Top 10 Cloud Orchestration Solutions 
• Interview: Randall Shore On Achieving The Most From Your Cloud Environment
• Interview: Eldad Chai On DataSecOps As The Model For Successful Cloud Adoption
• Blog: Cloud Computing: What Are Cloud Environments, And How Do Cloud Services Work?