What Is a Platform Orchestrator? Benefits & Examples

Increasing organizations' speed while maintaining control can be challenging, especially when managing infrastructure at scale. Platform orchestrators and internal developer platforms (IDPs) that use them help teams improve these aspects by automating coordination, deployment, and management of infrastructure and applications across various environments. These systems act as a bridge between multiple tools and platforms, integrating with infrastructure components, APIs, and service layers to automate workflows, enforce policies, and optimize resource utilization. By using platform orchestrators, organizations can solve challenges related to security, governance, and compliance, cost optimization, automation, standardization, enhanced developer velocity, and powerful visibility. Examples of platform orchestrators include Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Azure Bicep, Terragrunt, Docker, Kubernetes, Istio, Linkerd, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS EventBridge, and Spacelift. Platform orchestrators can be used in various categories, including infrastructure as code, configuration management, containers, security, event orchestration, and service mesh. By combining platform orchestrators with IDPs, organizations can transform their workflows into robust and streamlined systems.