Compute in public cloud regions

The multi-cloud platform enables you to add public cloud regions and vCloud Director clouds as public cloud regions for compute and/or billing.

The default Hybrid tab of the Home dashboard view can display public cloud billing information, including latest bills and estimated bills. For details of the dashboard widgets, see Hybrid and for configuration details, see Display cloud provider billing data. 

For compute access, you can offer cloud tenants a federation of private cloud and public clouds in a single pane of glass. And you can control the use of public cloud resources in the same way as you can in the platform's private cloud datacenter (quotas, limits, etc).  

The platform manages public cloud regions using remote services. When you create a public cloud region, the remote services can be shared with other datacenters or public cloud regions, and you do not need an NFS repository. 

Each cloud tenant using the public cloud region will require its own cloud provider account and needs to add a set of credentials to the Enterprise. You can use Abiquo to manage AWS and Azure reseller accounts for your customers.

When users create a virtual datacenter and deploy in the public cloud region, the platform creates the entities in the public cloud provider. For example, in AWS, Abiquo creates a VPC and in AWS, VMs deployed in the VPC virtual datacenter are AWS EC2 Instances. 

Abiquo also synchronizes with all public cloud providers to onboard virtual resources, either at the virtual datacenter or regional level. An examples of a provider with virtual datacenter synchronization is AWS, and one with regional synchronization is Google Cloud Platform.

A public cloud region represents a region of a cloud provider in Abiquo, to enable users to have compute access: to use virtual resources and deploy VMs in the cloud, and/or billing access: to display cloud billing data on the dashboard.

Before you begin:

• For vCloud Director, obtain credentials for the Administrator or Organization. For more details see VMware vCloud Director integration

To create a public cloud region:

1. Go to Infrastructure → Public

2. Click the + add button at the bottom of the Public cloud regions list 

3. On the Create public cloud region dialog, enter the base Name and select the Provider.

4. Select the Regions

   • The platform will create a region with Name, and for the next regions it will add a suffix of _1, _2, and so on, and the region’s location.  

   • If the platform cannot create a region, it will go on to the next region on the list.

     

5. Click Next

6. For the Virtualization manager, in the remote services IP address field, enter the domain name of the Remote Services server.

   1. You can share the remote services with multiple public cloud regions or private cloud.

      1. You can select the Remote Services server from the pulldown, and click Duplicate IP address

   2. We recommend that you Check the remote services before you save your regions

      

7. Click Save

   The platform will create your public cloud region.

To allow users to deploy in the public cloud region, edit your enterprises to:

1. Edit Datacenters and add the new region to the Allowed datacenters list

2. Add Credentials for the cloud provider API. See Obtain public cloud credentials

   1. You will require one separate account for each enterprise using a public cloud region, which means one account or subscription per enterprise

   2. For certain regions, such as those in China, you will require separate credentials, which you can enter separately after you select the appropriate provider, such as Amazon CHINA

   3. For vCloud Director, you will require Organization and Administrator credentials 

To allow administrators to manage the public cloud region, edit your user scopes and add the new region

To work with public cloud regions or obtain billing data, an enterprise can have one public cloud account or subscription per cloud provider. All the users in the tenant will work with this same account. No other enterprises can share the same account or subscription.

Before you begin:

1. Obtain credentials to access the cloud provider's API. For Abiquo's basic guides, see Obtain public cloud credentials.  Always check your provider documentation too.

To add public cloud credentials:

1. Go to Users view and edit an enterprise

2. Go to Credentials → Public

3. Select the Provider. There may be a separate provider for regions requiring different credentials

To add credentials for compute with optional billing and pricing:

1. Enter the Access key ID:

   1. For AWS, enter the Access key ID

   2. For Azure standard accounts and CSP customers, the format is subscription-id#app-id#tenant-id

   3. For GCP the format is project_id#client_id#client_email#private_key_id

   4. For OCI the format is tenancy#user#fingerprint

2. For the Secret access key:

   1. For AWS, enter the Secret access key

   2. For Azure, enter the password for the application.

   3. For GCP, enter the private key in the correct format

   4. For OCI enter the private key in PEM format.

3. Optionally, for Amazon, GCP, or OCI billing, select Also use for pricing. 
   For Azure, to add billing credentials, go to Pricing.
   See Add public cloud pricing credentials for a tenant

To add credentials for billing only:

• For a standard AWS customer account, do the steps at Add a customer AWS account for billing only

• For a customer of an Azure CSP or an Amazon organization do these steps.

  1. Enter the Access key ID as follows:

     • For Azure, the format is subscription-id##tenant-id

     • For Amazon, the format is account-id
       

       

  2. For the Secret access key, enter a random string

  3. Click Add account. Abiquo will validate your credentials with the cloud provider and save them

  4. Finish editing the enterprise and click Save

The platform will add the cloud provider account for the enterprise, which will also require access to a public cloud region.

The platform displays infrastructure statistics and resource usage for private and public cloud. You can display statistics for all datacenters or all public cloud regions, or filter them for a specific datacenter or region.

To view the resource usage of a cloud location:

1. Go to Infrastructure → Private or Public

2. Select All, or select a datacenter or public cloud region

3. If necessary, to display the Statistics view, click on the chart statistics button