All public cloud providers offer basic similar features that enable users to configure and deploy virtual machines in their public cloud platforms. And each public cloud provider has its own special features that may make it more attractive for a particular application.

Now users could work directly with public cloud platforms, it may seem difficult to maintain control, as though the users were just walking into a datacenter and grabbing a few servers to install and run their choice of software! This section explains how the Abiquo multi-cloud platform can bring everything together and save costs, and it also introduces some basic technical concepts of the public cloud integrations. 

Public cloud management concepts

This section describes just two of the key concepts of public cloud management in Abiquo. These features are in addition to the powerful policy and governance of Abiquo's multi-cloud platform, which includes user privileges and allocation limits for private and public cloud.

Manage costs

No one likes a big public cloud bill surprise but you probably know someone who has received one! The Abiquo public cloud platform obtains public cloud billing data for recent bills from all providers and even has an aggregate view of all providers, so that you and your users (if you allow them) can discover the trends in public cloud costs.

And it loads the current usage on a daily basis to incorporate into an estimate of the next bill.

And Abiquo enables you to create and track budgets across multiple public cloud provider accounts based on this usage and billing data.

All of these cost control features are available at both a reseller and a customer level.

Manage reseller tenants

If your organization is a public cloud reseller (for example, as part of the CSP or APN programs), then you can easily create customer accounts through the platform, with the click of a button.

Just enter the details that the provider requires, including the cloud tenant ("Enterprise") that the account will belong to.

The platform will automatically create an account in the provider and add the credentials for the cloud tenant, so they will be ready to deploy. 

Technical public cloud concepts

Let's look at some key technical concepts of the Abiquo integrations with vCloud Director, AWS, and Azure. Abiquo offers unifies multiple different public cloud offerings to make it easier for your users to work in public cloud, and saving your public cloud experts time. It also gives you control over how much your users consume with resource allocation limits to match these technical elements.

Virtual datacenters

The platform offers user access to virtual datacenters (VDCs) that are separate groups of virtual resources. A VDC has equivalents in each cloud provider, so it gives you a common interface and API to all the providers - see the table below. For example, the platform’s concept of the VDC is equivalent to  the VPC in AWS (Amazon). In vCloud Director (vCloud), the VDC is equivalent to a vApp. In ARM Compute (Azure), the VDC is equivalent to a Virtual Network and its associated resources. 

Virtual appliances

Within its VDCs, the platform groups VMs into virtual appliances (VApps). The purpose of the VApp is to enable you to manage a group of VMs together, which means that you can deploy them in one click, or view their metrics together, or create custom metrics for the VApp, for example. You can move VMs from one VApp to another within the same VDC. A VApp is not equivalent to any specific concept in vCloud or public cloud.

Networks

In vCloud, the platform supports the onboarding of the following networks. Users can also fully manage certain network types.

• External networks outside the OrgVDC but connected to the Edge are external networks in the platform, for use by load balancers but not VM vNICs
• External networks outside the OrgVDC with a direct connection to OrgVDC as OrgVDCNetwork are external networks
• Org networks inside the Org VDC and routed through the Edge are external networks
• Isolated Org networks are external networks, for use by VM vNICs but not load balancers
• vApp networks are private networks.