Abiquo Concepts

Abiquo offers a single cloud console for your public clouds and private data centers. And it enables you to present your customers with a single cloud bill!

Abiquo has the building blocks for a customized cloud service, so you can use the features that best match your business goals. 

Abiquo functional map

The Abiquo cloud management platform consists of an Abiquo Server (providing central management) and a set of Remote Services for each datacenter and for public cloud regions.

The platform presents a number of services to the cloud consumers to provide cloud services, and to enable the use of integration and automation solutions on top of them:

• The Server manages the platform and delivers service as defined by cloud administrators

• The API provides access to the platform functionality, allowing integration or automation

• The self-service Apps library provides VM templates and blueprints to run on the platform and use its resources

• The UI allows cloud consumers to use the platform through the Abiquo Server

• Dashboards, Reporting, Accounting, and Metering show how the platform is being used and enable Billing

Here is a basic functional map for private cloud.

As the basic functional map shows, Abiquo adds a thin unintrusive management layer to the existing cloud infrastructure and providers. There is no impact on any VMs that are already running. The Cloud Admins can add the physical and virtual infrastructure to Abiquo in a controlled way on their own timescales.

Abiquo does more than just cloud provisioning!

In addition to the basic concepts, the following diagram shows some of the specialized feature sets that Abiquo can provide as part of a cloud service! For example, with Abiquo you can:

• Manage costs with budgets, pricing estimates, dashboards displaying usage and bills, and allocation limits. Synchronize price books from Amazon and Azure. Control your cloud costs.
• Automatically scale out or in to adjust your workloads (and cloud bills) to your application requirements on any cloud. Save on cloud costs.
• Manage automation on any cloud, using guest tools or the cloud-init standard. Save system administrators' time.
• Automate your infrastructure using Abiquo integrations with Terraform and Chef, or using standard tools such as Ansible and Puppet. Save system administrator time.
• Create your own integrations using the complete Abiquo REST API, with Java and Python libraries. Use the Java stream client to follow activity on the platform. Customize your cloud platform to implement your business objectives.
    

Cloud administrators

This section describes the platform from the administrator's point of view. On the Abiquo multi-cloud IaaS platform, Cloud Administrators manage resources, and give users controlled access to self-service resources. Cloud administrators perform tasks such as the following.

• Register physical resources and public cloud services in the platform, then grant virtual resources to users. Administrators allow users to have self-service in the cloud, while Administrators remain in control of the physical resources and public cloud services. 
• Create Enterprises, which are the basic cloud tenants, and tenant hierarchies. Administrators allocate resources to enterprises and use policy to control access to resources, including user roles and privileges.  Cloud Administrators can automate management tasks and delegate them to resellers, for example.
• Create the Apps library, which contains VM templates and application blueprints. The Apps library is the key to self-service on the platform, enabling users to easily consume the cloud resources in the virtual datacenters. Administrators can share templates and blueprints using tenant access control lists. This enables you to provide Software as a Service (SaaS) on top of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). And you can allow tenant administrators to upload their own templates or create their own blueprints.
• Create Virtual Datacenters (VDCs) where users will consume their cloud resources. VDCs are logical groups of resources bound to a single Abiquo datacenter and virtualization backend, or public cloud provider. The Cloud Administrator can provide different service levels by using different technology stacks for different VDCs. Administrators can apply policies to VDCs using allocation limits (controlling compute, network and storage) or defining the users within an enterprise who can work with each VDC, and their level of access. For example, read only access in public cloud.
• Administrators create pricing models. Administrators enter pricing information for billing that also enables them to offer pricing estimates to users.

Cloud users

This section describes the platform from the user's point of view. Abiquo users can log in to the user interface and easily consume virtual resources through their virtual datacenters. Users perform tasks such as the following.

• Users with self-service can create their own virtual appliances (VApps) within the VDCs. VApps are groups (like folders) with one or more virtual machines (VMs). Users can build their own configurations or take advantage of application blueprints to deploy ready-made configurations. They can then automate and scale their VM configurations.
• Users have controlled self-service because the entire platform is controlled by policy. This enables the Cloud Administrator to maintain control of the physical infrastructure and public cloud services. Policy controls the amount of resources that are allocated to Enterprises and VDCs, where the resources are located, and how they can be used.
• Users can obtain estimates of the cost of their VApps before deploy or on demand.

Related pages

• Next page: Abiquo Components