AWS integration

Introduction to Abiquo and AWS

The Abiquo Amazon EC2 integration is a multi-cloud feature that enables our customers to add Amazon public cloud regions to the Abiquo platform as part of our agnostic public cloud management. With the Abiquo platform you will be able to offer a service that is a federation of Abiquo private clouds and the public cloud. Cloud tenants can deploy virtual resources in public cloud regions or in Abiquo datacenters using the same award-winning user interface.

You can control the use of public cloud resources in the same way as in the Abiquo datacenter (quotas, limits, viewer roles, etc). And users can also work with Abiquo multi-cloud features such as workload automation with action plans and autoscaling in public cloud. And the platform also obtains price lists and billing data from the provider to use in features such as billing dashboards, cost estimates, budgets with action plans, and a single bill for each cloud tenant. And Abiquo supports reseller accounts in the AWS Partner Network for use with tenant hierarchies.

AWS public cloud regions

Administrators add Amazon regions to the platform as Abiquo public cloud regions. Abiquo manages public cloud regions using a set of the Abiquo Remote Services. The remote services used in a public cloud region can be shared with other datacenters or public cloud regions. Abiquo caches details of AMI templates but it does not store their disks, so no NFS repository is required for a public cloud region. Each Abiquo public cloud region corresponds to a single Region in Amazon EC2. Multiple cloud tenants can then access this region.

Diagram of private and public cloud providers managed by Abiquo with remote services

Tenants and AWS credentials

Each Abiquo enterprise using the Amazon public cloud region should have its own AWS account. Abiquo will validate your Amazon credentials (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key) with AWS. Each enterprise may register ONE set of credentials for the enterprise's AWS account. You cannot register another set of credentials for the same account in another enterprise. In the case of a tenant hierarchy, the reseller may register the credentials of their partner account. Then each customer will have compute and/or billing credentials. You can also register an AWS organization under a reseller, and each enterprise under the organization will have its own credentials.

Diagram of tenant entities in Abiquo and AWS

An AWS account may also have access to pricing data. If you register pricing credentials, the platform can onboard public cloud price lists for use with features such as cost estimates for users, budgets, and billing. If you also enable programmatic billing in Amazon and register the S3 bucket where you are saving billing reports, the platform can display provider billing data on the dashboard. The platform can aggregate this data at the customer level for a set of related tenants, as well as at the reseller level.

Some regions, such as those in China, may require separate credentials, and for these regions, the administrator must select a separate provider, for example, "AWS (China)".

Abiquo VDCs and VMs in Amazon

When users create a virtual datacenter in the public cloud region, Abiquo works with Amazon EC2 to create a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). When users create VMs, the platform creates Amazon Instances.

Diagram of Abiquo entities and AWS entities

For remote access to your VM, add your public key to your Abiquo user before you deploy a VM. Add a firewall to your VM to allow access to the remote access port for SSH. The platform will create your VM using your RSA public key. To access the instance, you will need the corresponding RSA private key.

Manage Amazon Instances with Abiquo

Do not rename an Amazon instance in AWS or you will break the link between Abiquo and the VM. If the link is broken, you will not be able to manage the VM with Abiquo again. Do not delete the tags created by Abiquo.

If you need to manage your Abiquo Elastic IPs in Amazon, synchronize them to update changes in Abiquo or you may see unexpected results.

How Abiquo creates a virtual private cloud

Abiquo configures VPC networking Scenario 2 as described in the AWS documentation. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/VPC_Scenario2.html.

Diagram of how Abiquo creates a VPC in AWS with a NAT gateway

Abiquo creates a VPC in AWS with one Availability zone only. When you create this in AWS using the wizard, it creates three routing tables, but Abiquo creates two and marks the private routing table as Main.

Abiquo creates a public subnet where the name is the AWS Subnet ID, in the format subnet-xxxx, which is the provider ID for the public subnet. The NAT gateway that AWS creates in a VPC uses a private IP in the public subnet.

The primary private IP of the NAT gateway is automatically assigned by AWS. In Abiquo we always set the first IP as the gateway, because according to the documentation, it is reserved for the VPC router. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/subnet-sizing.html

In Abiquo the public IP of the NAT gateway enables access to the internet from the private subnet, but it does not allow incoming connections.

To connect from outside the VPC, you will need at least one VM with an IP address in the public subnet, and one public IP. To allow connections to your VM via the public IP, AWS automatically creates a DNAT rule using the internet gateway.

When you create a VPC in Abiquo, it does not onboard the IPs of the private subnets. You need to synchronize each network to onboard its IPs.

Technical notes about AWS networks

When creating a NAT gateway, Abiquo will reuse floating IPs that are not assigned to a VDC.
VMs in private networks will have internet access through the public subnet.
Users can create public subnets and Abiquo will assign them to route tables with a route to the internet gateway.
When Abiquo creates new public subnets, it will not create any new NAT gateways.
If users delete the original public subnet, this will also delete the original NAT gateway. But Abiquo will replace all the routes in the main route table that route traffic to the deleted NAT gateway with a new rule to route traffic to the internet gateway.
Abiquo users must attach Elastic IPs to VMs with a connection to a public subnet.
Note that AWS may charge for Elastic IPs when they are NOT in use, i.e. when they are not assigned to a VM or when the VM is not deployed in AWS.
The private subnet is a private connect network.
To deploy to different Availability zones, create a private networks (VPC subnet) for each zone.
The private subnets in the same availability zone as a public subnet will have internet access through the public subnet.
Abiquo creates a VPC with a minimum network size of /16 and a subnet of size /24, or with the sizes defined by the user.
You can set a custom private network in Abiquo and this network will be used to create the VPC and subnet in Abiquo.
You can create multiple address spaces (called Abiquo address ranges) and Abiquo private networks in different availability zones in the same VPC.
AWS reserves the first four IP addresses and the last IP address of a VPC private connect network.
For a network that is defined to start with address 0, the first available IP address will be address 4 and the gateway address is address 1.
You can synchronize existing VMs and create new IP addresses through Abiquo, including multiple Elastic IPs.
The maximum number of IP addresses is determined by the AWS hardware profile (instance type). See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-eni.html#AvailableIpPerENI
Abiquo adds IPs in the same subnet to the same elastic network interface.
For information about Elastic Network Interfaces, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-eni.html

Security groups

Abiquo firewall policies correspond to AWS Security Groups and Abiquo onboards security groups from Amazon VPCs. Abiquo registers the default security group of a VPC as the default firewall policy of the Abiquo virtual datacenter. This firewall policy allows all outbound traffic from VMs. Abiquo users can select another firewall policy as the default. Remember that you must configure a firewall to allow remote access to your VMs in AWS.

See Manage firewalls

Load balancers

Abiquo supports Classic load balancers and Application load balancers. Abiquo allows VMs on different subnets to be connected to the same load balancer.

See AWS load balancers table

Storage

Abiquo supports EBS storage, including encryption and delete on termination volumes.

See Abiquo and AWS storage