.. _cloud-orchestration:

#############
Orchestration
#############

Cloud orchestration allows you to deploy applications and infrastructure using
a simple template language that describes your desired resources and their
relationship. The template format is based on YAML and is called the
*Heat Orchestration Template* (HOT). When a template is modified, the service
orchestrates the required changes to the infrastructure in the appropriate
order. Templates can be managed like code and stored in your preferred version
control system. The orchestration service will also manage the life-cycle of
application stacks on your behalf.  More information about Heat can be found in
the OpenStack wiki: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Heat

.. Heat makes auto-scaling easy. You can define a scaling group and a scaling
   policy and Heat will add or remove compute instances to the group as
   required.

The orchestration service can be integrated to configuration management systems
to provision and manage software. It can run `Puppet`_ in standalone
mode, or be used to present compute instances back to the Puppet/Chef master
for software configuration.

.. _Puppet: https://www.puppet.com/

On top of all the benefits that the cloud orchestration service offers you,
there are no additional charges for its use.
You will only pay for the resources consumed by your running application stacks
(such as compute, network and storage).

|

.. toctree::
  :maxdepth: 1

  orchestration/using-heat-cli
  orchestration/hot-format
  orchestration/autohealing
  orchestration/autoscaling
  orchestration/faq