Orchestrator is represented by a lightweight, but powerful xOpera orchestration tool that is compliant with OASIS TOSCA standard. It enables orchestration of automated tasks within cloud applications for different cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP or OpenFaaS. The tool can be used and integrated to other infrastructures in order to deploy services or applications and therefore reduce the human factor. xOpera uses Ansible automation tool to implement the TOSCA standard and to run operations via Ansible playbooks that are powerful and easy to use. Apart from the CLI and API, the orchestrator is also distributed as a SaaS component, which comes with a simple browser-based GUI. The xOpera SaaS orchestrator brings the ability to use the orchestrator without setting it up in the local environment and offers a possibility to use the orchestrator from different devices and share the deployment project with other users inside the DevOps team.
In the following video, our project partner XLAB presents the xOpera SaaS and shows how to use it natively from GUI. The xOpera SaaS GUI exposes a multi-user and a multi-tenant service offering all capabilities of the console-based opera orchestrator, providing all of its functionalities as a service of Web 3.0, where you can interact with it through the browser. Using the browser version is straightforward. The basic workflow includes the following actions:
- Define orchestration secrets (e.g., ssh keys, cloud credentials, etc.) prior to deployment.
- Author a new workspace to contain your project.
- Assign your secrets to the workspace.
- Create a new xOpera project from a TOSCA CSAR.
- Specify which TOSCA service template and inputs you are using, then validate them.
- In the end, deploy the project.
Apart from validation or undeployment, the SaaS GUI also enables other more complex orchestration actions such as redeployment and creating HTTP callbacks to invoke TOSCA triggers and events, which can perform useful actions (e.g., scaling). The SaaS GUI and API are also connected to the Template Library API, so it is possible to create a new project by using prepared blueprints from TPS instead of uploading them manually.