Abiquo concepts

Owned by MS (Unlicensed)
Jan 17, 2023
5 min read

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 administrator 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.

Screenshot: Abiquo enables you to manage and inventory cloud resources

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. 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 surprise giant bills!

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 and onboard cost and usage data, and create a single cloud bill for your users. 

Screenshot: The customizable Abiquo dashboard displays public cloud costs that you can also use in multicloud budgets

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 you can integrate to build PAAS, managed services, and more. For example, to build managed services Abiquo enables you to:

  • Restrict user access to virtual datacenters

  • Create read-only access, and other overrides of user roles per provider or virtual datacenter

  • Outsource user systems that will run on the user's virtual resources and are included in their single cloud bill  

  • Deliver datacenter services through restricted networks and reserved IP addresses

  • Whitelabel the UI per customer or per reseller

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.

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