Introduction
Abiquo is a fully integrated multicloud 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!
Abiquo's cloud boosting features work across private and public clouds and offer a true multicloud experience that is beyond cloud native. Abiquo's features are adapted to the cloud providers and also independent of them.
The following sections describe Abiquo's features and how Abiquo fulfills the Gartner CMP functional requirements in the areas of cloud management.
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
Abiquo features for resource management
For cloud resource management, to save the administration staff costs of managing complex, different portals and technology, Abiquo offers the following features.
Simple, unified, provisioning, and orchestration that you can automate
Centralized multi-cloud inventory view for administrators and users
Multi-cloud tag management to help you find and manage inventory across the cloud and drive a FinOps culture with multicloud 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 configurations in blueprints (specs) that users can select, customize, and launch in any cloud
Multi-cloud monitoring and observability with support for custom application metrics, and users can receive notifications and create automation based on monitoring data.
Business features with multicloud budgets and cost control
For cloud budget and cost control, Abiquo's clear centralized dashboard displays all costs broken down by service and recommends how users can optimize their resources. The dashboard can display your estimated bill for each public cloud provider and private cloud. Administrators can create multicloud budgets to manage costs.
This saves administration staff costs of obtaining cost visibility and applying spending limits in different portals and helps you to avoid stray resources that can 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.
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 systems to create the right cloud to meet your business objectives. For example:
Configure and launch systems from an ITSM integration
Use the Workflow feature for approvals, to create configuration, or to update a CMDB.
This feature holds VM operations and sends a webhook to an integration with a workflow system
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, Azure MySQL, Microsoft Products, AWX, and more.
And with Abiquo’s built-in features to support managed services you can:
Whitelabel the UI per reseller and URL
Restrict user access to virtual datacenters
Create read-only access, and other overrides of user roles per provider or virtual datacenter
Let users outsource systems that will run on their virtual resources and are included in their single cloud bill
Deliver datacenter services through restricted networks and reserved IP addresses
Abiquo cloud architecture concepts
Adding Abiquo to your environment does not impact on any virtual resources that are already running. Cloud Administrators can add their infrastructure and providers to Abiquo in a controlled way on their own timescales. The Abiquo platform servers are an Abiquo API Server (for central management), a set of Abiquo Remote Services for each datacenter/public cloud region, and a Monitoring Server. In private cloud, Abiquo will also use a Service catalogue disk folder to store software templates.
The Abiquo cloud management services perform actions that are based on user actions or automation. Abiquo checks your infrastructure and providers to update its database without making any changes to your cloud resources. And you can easily check who has done what in the Events view!
Next, the Abiquo components section provides a more detailed introduction to the Abiquo cloud architecture.
Abiquo summary
The Abiquo platform is a true multicloud 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.
Abiquo also has the building blocks for a customized cloud service, using the Abiquo UI, REST API, and integration points.
Abiquo enables Cloud Administrators to manage resources in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, in an agentless 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 includes 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 showing how the infrastructure is used and where VMs exist on the platform
Abiquo meters all operations, which means that it measures and tracks all resources allocated or consumed. This enables accounting and billing of the usage of the cloud service.
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