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Introduction
Abiquo is a fully integrated multicloud management platform with a single cloud console
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for resource management
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and cloud budget and cost control.
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Screenshot: Abiquo enables you to manage and inventory cloud resources
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The
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Abiquo platform is a cloud-agnostic management layer that sits above your cloud infrastructure and cloud providers. Abiquo supports VMware, AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, and more!
Abiquo's cloud boosting features work across private and public clouds and offer a true multicloud experience that
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is beyond cloud native.
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Abiquo's features are adapted to the
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Out of the box, Abiquo is a very complete cloud management platform but it is also designed from the ground up to be extensible by integration, so you can build PAAS, managed services, and more. You can decide how much automation you require. For example, your system administrators may create an integration to launch systems from within your ITSM system, but users may work with their virtual resources using the Abiquo UI. Even the Abiquo UI can support integration and extensions with JavaScript.
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cloud providers and also independent of them.
The following sections describe Abiquo's features and how Abiquo fulfills the Gartner CMP functional requirements in the areas of cloud management.
Source: Gartner ®, “Solution Criteria for Cloud Management Tools”, Marco Meinardi, Alan Waite, Brian Adler, 20 August 2020. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission
Abiquo features for resource management
For cloud resource management, to save the administrator staff costs of managing complex, different portals and technology, Abiquo offers the following features.
- Simple, unified, provisioning, and orchestration that you can automate
- Centralized multi-cloud inventory view for administrators and users, and multi-cloud tag management to help you find and manage inventory across the cloud
- BaaS and DRaaS to directly offer your users local backup and disaster recovery without any pesky integrations, and automatically add services to the customer's bill!
- Prepackaged configurations in blueprints (specs) that users can select, customize, and launch in any cloud
- Multi-cloud monitoring and observability with support for custom application metrics, and users can receive notifications and create automation based on monitoring data.
Screenshot: Abiquo enables you to manage and inventory cloud resources
Business features with multicloud budgets and cost control
For cloud budget and cost control, Abiquo's clear centralized dashboard displays all costs broken down by service and recommends how users can optimize their resources. The dashboard can display your estimated bill for each public cloud provider. Administrators can create multicloud budgets to manage costs. This saves administration staff costs of obtaining cost visibility and applying spending limits in different portals and helps you to avoid stray resources that can lead to surprise giant bills!
Abiquo is designed for business use and it meets your identity, security, and compliance needs with features such as:
- Single sign on support
- Role based access control
- Policy for all clouds
Under these controls, Abiquo Service enablement can provide more or less self-service as required, and also support managed services and service automation.
Administrators can manage multiple accounts, roles, and policies across multiple clouds. You can easily create and add accounts under your partner account in public cloud and onboard cost and usage data, and create a single cloud bill for your users.
Screenshot: The customizable Abiquo dashboard displays public cloud costs that you can also use in multicloud budgets
Abiquo integrates with your business and cloud systems
Abiquo is a complete cloud platform out of the box, with dashboards, event logs, event streaming, and built-in and custom reports. Abiquo is also extensible by integration. You can integrate Abiquo with your business processes, DevOps, and systems to create the right cloud to meet your business objectives.
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For example:
Abiquo cloud services
The Abiquo cloud management services consist of an Abiquo API Server (providing central management) and a set of Abiquo Remote Services for each datacenter, and for public cloud regions.
The platform offers a number of cloud services, and you can add integration and automation solutions too.
For example, here are some of the core services:
The Server manages the platform and delivers service as defined by cloud administrators
The REST API provides access to the platform functionality, allowing integration or automation
The self-service Apps library (Service catalogue and Image library) provides VM templates and blueprints to run on the platform and use its resources
The UI gives cloud consumers a consistent user experience across public cloud providers and private cloud
Dashboards, Reporting, Accounting, and Metering record and display platform usage. They also enable you to send each tenant a single cloud bill for their multicloud services!
In addition, you can use enhancement packs to work with services such as:
- Backup as a Service using popular backup technology such as Veeam, Networker, and Rubrik
- Disaster Recovery as a Service using Zerto
Functional map
Here is a basic functional map of Abiquo.
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- Configure and launch systems from an ITSM integration
- Use the Workflow feature for approvals, to create configuration, or to update a CMDB.
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- This feature holds VM operations and sends a webhook to an integration with a workflow system
- Access ticketing systems through an ITSM integration
- Automate your VM configurations with cloud-init, cloudbase-init, and guest tools
And with Abiquo you can integrate to build PAAS, managed services, and more. For example, to build managed services Abiquo enables you to:
- Restrict user access to virtual datacenters
- Create read-only access, and other overrides of user roles per provider or virtual datacenter
- Outsource user systems that will run on the user's virtual resources and are included in their single cloud bill
- Deliver datacenter services through restricted networks and reserved IP addresses
- Whitelabel the UI per customer or per reseller
Abiquo cloud architecture concepts
Adding Abiquo to your environment does not impact on any virtual resources that are already running.
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Cloud Administrators can add their infrastructure and providers
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to Abiquo in a controlled way on their own timescales.
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Abiquo provisions virtual resources and much more. For example, 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 administrator 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.
Out of the box, Abiquo is a very complete cloud management, and cloud budget and cost control platform.
Abiquo also offers the building blocks for a customized cloud service, so you can use the optional features that best match your business goals.
With Abiquo you really can customize your cloud platform to implement your business objectives.
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Abiquo doesn't do anything to virtual resources without user actions or automation. Abiquo will update its own information when it checks and synchronizes but it doesn't delete anything. Abiquo doesn't power off or undeploy VMs. So if something has happened to your VM, you can check in the events view and you will probably find out that someone else in the team has done something to your VM! |
Supported providers
Abiquo supports the most popular hypervisors and public cloud providers including:
- VMware vCenter clusters and hosts
- VMware vCloud Director
- Amazon AWS
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Extensible platform example
For example, to build Managed Services, you can take advantage of advanced features such as:
- Restriction of access to virtual datacenters within tenants
- Easy launch of readymade apps using blueprints
- Delivery of datacenter services with restricted networks and IP addresses
- Access control using RBAC with granular privileges and custom role override (e.g. read only access)
- Single sign on integrations
- Management of partner accounts in public cloud
- Whitelabelling per customer, or even per reseller with custom URLs
Integrations
Abiquo customers use the following kinds of business process, DevOps, and systems integrations.
- Configure and launch systems using an ITSM integration
- Create configuration or update a CMDB by holding VM operations and sending a webhook to a workflow integration
- Detailed private cloud billing with service breakdown based on complete usage metering
- Hierarchical access control to dashboard display of public cloud cost and usage data from the cloud provider
- Estimated bill for public cloud and multicloud budget control with automation
- Ticketing system access through an ITSM integration
- Automation of virtual infrastructure with cloud-init
Cloud boosting features
Abiquo offers many multicloud features that sit above the cloud providers and infrastructure. These include the following.
- Multicloud cost control with
- User customizable billing dashboard with estimated bills
- Budgets with notifications and remediation actions
- Multicloud management with
- Ready to launch blueprints
- Agentless monitoring with alerts, notifications, and actions
- Automation that can also notify and send webhooks
- Workload driven autoscaling
Related pages
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The Abiquo platform servers are an Abiquo API Server (for central management), a set of Abiquo Remote Services for each datacenter/public cloud region, and a Monitoring Server. In private cloud, Abiquo will also use a Service catalogue disk folder to store software templates.
The Abiquo cloud management services perform actions are based on user actions or automation. Abiquo checks your infrastructure and providers to update its database without making any changes to your cloud resources. And you can easily check who has done what in the Events view!
Next, the Abiquo Components section provides a more detailed introduction to the Abiquo cloud architecture.
Related pages
This page belongs to the Get Started section
- For a more detailed description of Abiquo cloud architecture and installation types, see Abiquo Components
- To try Abiquo in a PoC or other test environment, do these walkthroughs:
- To try Abiquo from scratch, with no infrastructure in the platform, do Abiquo Quick Tutorial
- For Abiquo manuals, see Abiquo Cloud Guides
For a full description of the platform and examples of administrator tasks, see Abiquo Walkthrough
If you have a demo license, see Add a license
To get some sample images into your Service catalogue, see Add Virtual Machine Templates to Abiquo
For guides to Abiquo features, see Abiquo features by version