Operation Orcharastion Service is a free and managed O&M service offered by Alibaba Cloud. OOS can help automate cloud resource management with ready-to-use templates or write the tasks in YAML or JSON.

As a Cloud Engineer, some of the daily activities include applying server patches, restarting or shutting down servers, cleaning up disks, Installing software, building images, and sharing them with different teams. All these tasks can be configured and scheduled with OOS.

Some of the advantages of using OOS includes

Process Automation:

OOS supports multiple automation strategies. For example, one can choose to execute manual, semi-automatic, and completely automated processes.

If your account has more than one ECS instance and wants to install new application packages like a web server, then it can be achieved through selecting package type and instance and executing the task.

Let’s say one wants to update all the packages on all the servers at a particular schedule then this can also be done using OSS.

OSS supports programming languages like Python, PERL, Linux Shell, Powershell, and Powershell scrips. This gives a wide variety of possibilities for automation.

Process Visualization:

OOS provides visual representations of the process. That means one can validate the current process stage without looking at the logs. This makes non-technical users validate the process status and provide information to technical people if needed quickly.

Visualization helps users find out if there are any blockers and requires any interventions to resolve them.

Managed and Free Service:

Operations Orcherations Service is an entirely free and managed service platform. End-user requires to pay for only the resources that they use. As the services are managed, the end-user does not need to worry about the underlying hardware and scaling.

Multiple O&M:

Users can execute multiple executions at the same time. OOS defines execution priority and holds until the process is completed.

Integration with RAM:

OOS can be integrated with almost all Alibaba Cloud Services. For security, one can integrate it with Resource Access Management.

Ready to use templates:

Multiple ready-to-use templates are available on OOS to reduce the workload on creating workflows. Also, one can define a template and save it for future use.

Cross-region support:

OOS supports cross regions which give the capability of creating tasks once and using them across multiple regions. Reducing redundant work and improving efficiency. However, at a time, only one region execution is possible.

Operations as a code:

OOS follows operations as a code principal, thus making it easy for users to save or modify the operations code as and when needed. Currently, OOS supports YAML and JSON.

Delegate Authorization:

Account administrators can delegate authorizations to users based on their needs. This reduces the risks of system failure or unnecessary outages.

Operations Orchestration Service is one the most underrated service on Alibaba Cloud Platform and it can be used to optimize the cloud management workflow with few clicks. Alibaba Cloud DevOps Pipelines - Flow is using OOS as a backend to complete the tasks. In the upcoming blog posts, we will cover the OOS more and explore Flow integrations.