Manage 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