Using Orca: A Summary

Orca is an application release and configuration automation platform that delivers

1) Central, Secure Control & Compliance Enforcement  2) Intelligent Workflow Automation of Linux, Unix and Windows ecosystems  3) Application Ecosystem Modeling & Visibility and 4)  Audit-ready  Reporting.

For more information on How Orca Works, please view our Orca product sheet and whitepapers or request a demo overview. 

1) Central, Secure Change Control & Compliance Enforcement 

• Orca inventories all of your configuration settings and it intelligently pushes configuration changes to all your environments using out-of-the-box integrations. Orca dynamically accesses configuration sources.  It manages configuration settings that can only be retrieved or changed via an API call into a specified service. An example would be changing a setting in IIS. Some of the settings can only be managed via interactive API.As part of its automation, Orca provides a normalized version of your configurations in a human friendly format where all of your configurations are conveniently stored in an accessible, centralized location.
• Users manage drift by setting their own custom compliance rules.

  After Orca’s Configuration Normalization Engine does its work, you now have several powerful options as your next steps:

  1. Simply view the configuration data
  2. Detect drift your way. For instance you can compare your normalized configurations to
     • A Gold Master
     • A Reference Point in Time
  3. Apply your own custom compliance rules including
     • Ignore
     • Apply Rules such as
     • • =, ≠, <, >, or value range
       • “Same as”, “Different than” or even “Similar to (config data on another node)”.
         ** This powerful tool is what helps you relate apps to one another, which in turn helps you to know beforehand that “changing this will break that”.
• Use “Dry Run” mode to validate whether configuration changes will be successful before they’re actually executed.  
• Shared team-based calendar publicizes upcoming changes, blackouts and maintenance windows. This eliminates major sources of miscommunications regarding the size, scope or timing of changes.
• Use Orca’s RBAC system (integrated with Microsoft Active Directory) to control via API or web interface precisely which teams and individuals can manage or even view your important ecosystems.
• Read our Change Control article, RBAC article, DevOps Security or view our video explainers for additional information.

2) Intelligent Workflow Automation 

• Orca provides robust, extensively tested interfaces to business critical Unix, Linux and Windows-based applications, databases and middleware.
• Workflow automation delivers automated routine “bulk deploy” configuration updates as well as automated drift correction. 
• Not only can you change configurations, you can also create new configs or delete unnecessary configs. 
• Create and deploy websites to 1000s of servers in just a few minutes with enterprise scalability using intuitive interface.
• No need to write custom scripts. Orca does that for you. In fact, Orca users do not need to learn a new scripting or declarative language at all. 
• No “black box”. Multiple ways to pre-validate configuration changes before you run them including preview, “dry run” and interface editing capabilities.
• Optional auto-remediation eliminates reliance on manual processes.

Environment-Aware Application Deployments

• Orca combines the application artifacts with the captured infrastructure configuration data so users now promote their business critical applications and configurations simultaneously.
• After Release, Orca continues to monitor and manage compliance in application, middleware, database and OS configurations out of the box.
• Orca creates a Prod-to-Dev information flow that updates necessary configuration tweaks. This “OpsDev” approach ensures that Dev incorporates the most upto-date configs for its future releases.

3) Application Ecosystem Modeling 

• Orca’s intuitive “Builder View” provides architects the choice to use out-of-the-box templates or to create a custom ecosystem that models Dev, QA, Prod environments whether physical, virtual or cloud.
  The model establishes and updates relationships between applications, databases, middleware and their configurations. This model also provides the basis for future users to know that “changing this, affects that”.
• In contrast to viewer-only tools like Visio or CMDB solutions, Orca’s models are interactive. Orca pulls live configuration information to deliver an accurate, up-to-date representation of your application ecosystem and it automates configuration changes to keep your environments in compliance with your performance, availability and security policies.

   Ecosystem Visibility

• Intuitive bird’s-eye views of applications, relationships, dependencies and ecosystems promote ease of ongoing operation.
• IT Ops and DevOps teams rely on color-coded configuration Compliance Heat Maps to discover configuration drift detection at-a-glance. 
• Granular views provide details behind any compliance issues and provide remediation next steps.
• See our video explainers for more info on the Orca application configuration management system.

4) Audits and Reporting 

• Ongoing and ad hoc software configuration change reporting provides full process traceability and repeatability to deliver status reports, recaps and configuration audits.
• Beyond knowing what and when changes were made, achieve fuller transparency for PCI, HIPAA and other compliance audits by tracking the “who”, “where” and “why” behind those changes.
• Convenient summaries cut the effort required to provide management and executive level reporting.
• See our Compliance Audit & Reporting article and our  video explainers for more information.

Orca is a product of Trifectix, Inc.