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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 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.
Cloud administrators 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.
Administrators 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.
Administrators create virtual datacenters (VDCs) where users will consume their cloud resources. VDCs are logical groups of resources within 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
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Introduction
Abiquo is a fully integrated multi-cloud management platform with a single cloud console for resource management, and cloud budget and cost control.
The 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!
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Abiquo cloud architecture concepts
When you add Abiquo to your environment, it does not impact on any virtual resources that are already running. You can add your infrastructure and providers to Abiquo in a controlled way on your own timescales.
The Abiquo platform servers are an Abiquo API server for central management, a set of Abiquo Remote Services to manage each datacenter and public cloud region, and a Monitoring server to offer metrics on cloud resources. In production environments, you will usually also create a Services datanode cluster for your database and for the platform’s internal messaging and queueing services.
In private cloud, Abiquo will also use a Service catalogue disk folder on an NFS server to store software templates.
The Abiquo platform makes changes to your cloud resources from user actions and/or automations only. When Abiquo checks your infrastructure and providers, it updates its database but it doesn’t make any changes to your cloud resources. You can easily check who has done what in the Events view!
For a more detailed introduction to the Abiquo cloud architecture, see the Abiquo components section.
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Abiquo summary
The Abiquo platform is a true multi-cloud system that manages private data centers and public clouds through a single console, and enables you to offer your customers a single cloud bill and billing dashboard.
In addition to the core platform, Abiquo has the building blocks for your customized cloud service, using the Abiquo UI, REST API, and integration points
Abiquo let you manage resources in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, in an agent-free environment that supports progressive onboarding
Abiquo cloud users can easily obtain resources by self-service but always under the cloud policy and governance that you define
Abiquo's cost management and resource optimization system has billing dashboards with estimated bills, and budgets that can trigger automation
Abiquo provides inventory and classification with multi-cloud tags, the virtual resource inventory screens, as well as reports that show how infrastructure is used and where VMs exist on the platform
Abiquo meters all operations to measure and track all resources allocated or consumed. This lets you bill the usage of your cloud services
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Abiquo CMP features
Abiquo offers cloud boosting features that work across private and public clouds and provide a true multi-cloud experience. Abiquo's features are adapted to the cloud providers but function independently of them.
Abiquo fulfills the Gartner CMP functional requirements in the areas of cloud management, and the following sections describe the cloud management platform and its features.
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
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Abiquo features for managed services providers
The Abiquo platform has many built-in features to support managed service providers, which include the following.
White-label the UI per reseller with support for separate access URLs
Restrict user access to selected virtual datacenters
Create read-only access, and other overrides of user roles per provider or virtual datacenter
Let users outsource systems that will still run on their virtual resources and are included in their single cloud bill
Deliver datacenter services through restricted networks and reserved IP addresses
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Abiquo features for resource management
For cloud resource management, to help you more easily manage complex technology without using different portals, Abiquo offers the following features.
Simple, unified, provisioning, and orchestration that you can automate
Centralized multi-cloud inventory views for administrators and users
Multi-cloud tag management to help you find and manage inventory across the cloud and drive a FinOps culture with multi-cloud cost and usage, and billing dashboards
BaaS and DRaaS to directly offer your users local backup and disaster recovery without creating your own integrations, and automatically add services to the customer's bill!
Prepackaged application configurations as blueprints (specs) that users can select, customize, and launch in any cloud
Multi-cloud monitoring and observability with support for custom application metrics. Users can receive notifications and create automation based on monitoring data.
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Business features with multicloud budgets and cost control
For cloud budget and cost control, Abiquo has a clear centralized dashboard that displays all costs broken down by service and recommends how users can optimize their resources.
The billing dashboard helps make your cloud costs visible with estimated bills for all providers, and with multi-cloud budgets, you can easily apply spending limits for different providers, which can help to avoid stray resources that lead to giant bill surprises!
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, onboard cost and usage data, and create a single cloud bill for your users.
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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 other systems to create the right cloud to meet your business objectives. For example:
Configure and launch systems from an ITSM integration
Access ticketing systems through an ITSM integration
Automate your VM configurations with cloud-init, cloudbase-init, and guest tools
And with Abiquo’s XaaS feature, you can easily integrate PAAS and your own systems and services to create your unique multi-cloud platform. Abiquo has plugins available for you to easily offer Amazon RDS, Amazon Route 53, Microsoft Products, AWX, and more.
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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 Configure licenses
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