Introduction
The aim of this page is to help the reader understand Abiquo and what it can do to help their cloud users and their business.
Abiquo is a fully integrated multicloud management platform with a single cloud console for resource management and cloud budget and cost control.
Screenshot: Abiquo enables you to manage and inventory cloud resources
Screenshot: The customizable Abiquo dashboard displays public cloud costs
Abiquo is cloud agnostic and it supports popular cloud providers to offer a consistent user experience. Abiquo's own cloud boosting features sit above the provider clouds and offer a true multicloud experience that is beyond cloud native. These features are adapted to the underlying clouds but do not depend on them, so you are not locked in to any specific cloud provider. Moreover your users do not need to learn the details of every single provider, and your systems administrators do not need to spend as much time moving between cloud consoles.
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.
Abiquo is designed for business use with features such as RBAC, SSO, cost and usage dashboards and reports, event log and audit reports, custom reports, and so on. Abiquo integrates with your business processes, DevOps, and systems to create the right cloud to meet your business objectives. The Abiquo workflow feature enables you to easily integrate with an approvals system or a CMDB.
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.
Abiquo adds an unintrusive management layer to the existing cloud infrastructure and providers. Abiquo enables users to manage their virtual resources, and adding Abiquo to your environment does not impact on any virtual resources that are already running. The Cloud Administrators can add their providers and infrastructure to Abiquo in a controlled way on their own timescales.
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.
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
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