CloudOps Orchestration Service:Announcement on service upgrades

Since October 10, 2023, Alibaba Cloud has upgraded Operation Orchestration Service (OOS). The upgrades include the following items:

• The full name of the service is changed, but the abbreviation remains unchanged. The full name of the service is changed from Operation Orchestration Service to CloudOps Orchestration Service. The new name more accurately represents the positioning and capabilities of the service, which are the management and O&M of operating systems of cloud resources.

• The scope of the service is expanded. The capabilities provided by the previous OOS become the automated task module of the new OOS. The new OOS provides a suite of modules instead of providing only specific features. The modules include automated task, patch management, parameter management, configuration inventory, software package management, and application management.

Reasons for the upgrades

The previous OOS provides only capabilities for executing and managing O&M tasks, such as batch operations, scheduled O&M tasks, and event-triggered tasks. As users integrate OOS more closely with their business, Alibaba Cloud provides various supporting services based on the previous OOS. For example, parameter management helps store and manage configuration parameters required for O&M tasks, patch management helps manage and automatically fix system baselines and system patches of Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instances, configuration inventory helps store and maintain the configuration history of the operating system for ECS instances, and application management helps monitor a group of ECS instances and manage automated processes such as continuous integration or continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes. These services improve end-to-end O&M efficiency. To help you gain a more comprehensive understanding of the new capabilities provided by OOS, Alibaba Cloud upgrades OOS to include more management and configuration services related to O&M tasks, and releases the new OOS, which is CloudOps Orchestration Service.

The new OOS includes the following modules:

1. Automated task: provides capabilities of the previous OOS, which are automated orchestration of tasks, such as batch operations, scheduled tasks, alert- and event-triggered tasks, custom tasks, and common automated task templates.

2. Parameter management: provides centralized storage and management for various types of parameters required by automated tasks or other services, such as strings, passwords, and cloud resource IDs. This improves the security and convenience of parameter management.

3. Configuration inventory: stores and maintains the configuration information of ECS instances, such as instance IDs, IP addresses, platform types and versions, application names and versions, and file information. This facilitates the searches for configuration information and issue tracing.

4. Patch management: automatically scans and installs patches on the selected ECS instances on a regular basis or based on your business requirements to improve the security of the operating system of instances. You can specify custom patch baselines.

5. Application management: provides centralized management of resources and services that provide specific business features, such as publishing and deployment, monitoring and alerting, batch O&M, and cost analysis. This improves the resource O&M efficiency of applications.

Impacts of the upgrades

After the previous OOS is upgraded, you can directly use the new OOS without the need to activate the new OOS again if you have activated the previous OOS. If you did not activate the previous OOS, you must activate the new OOS before you can use the service.