14 Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks on IBM Power Systems: Volume 1
IT Service Management and orchestration
An IT Service Management (ITSM) perspective can provide automation and a global 
management view, and incorporate the necessary software disciplines that are required to 
build a solid infrastructure for an enterprise, commercial or not. 
The missing point was the orchestration and the orchestration of all containers and resources 
around them. Many people think that orchestration and automation are the same thing, but 
the orchestration is more complex. Automation often is discussed in the context of specific 
tasks, whereas orchestration refers to the automation of processes and workflows. 
Orchestration deals with the end-to-end process simplify the automation and the 
administration across specific machines and diverse dependencies (see Figure 2-3). 
Automation attempts to move people out of the equation whereas orchestration is not about 
rigid planning, but arranging and coordination of automated tasks, which ultimately results in 
a consolidated process or workflow. Parts can be automated, but the decision is still 
human-centric; for example, the definition of which tasks must run, the order of the tasks, role 
assignments, permission, post-deployment, failure recovery, and scaling. 
Figure 2-3   Where orchestration fits
For more information about automation, see 2.4, “Kubernetes: An open source container 
orchestration” on page 24.