Abiquo concepts

Introduction

Abiquo is a fully integrated multi-cloud 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 cloud architecture concepts

When you add Abiquo to your environment, it does not impact on any virtual resources that are already running. You can add your infrastructure and providers to Abiquo in a controlled way on your own timescales. 

The Abiquo platform servers are an Abiquo API server for central management, a set of Abiquo Remote Services to manage each datacenter and public cloud region, and a Monitoring server to offer metrics on cloud resources. In production environments, you will usually also create a Services datanode cluster for your database and for the platform’s internal messaging and queueing services.

In private cloud, Abiquo will also use a Service catalogue disk folder on an NFS server to store software templates.

The Abiquo platform makes changes to your cloud resources from user actions and/or automations only. When Abiquo checks your infrastructure and providers, it updates its database but it doesn’t make any changes to your cloud resources. You can easily check who has done what in the Events view!

For a more detailed introduction to the Abiquo cloud architecture, see the Abiquo components section.

Abiquo summary

The Abiquo platform is a true multi-cloud 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.

• In addition to the core platform, Abiquo has the building blocks for your customized cloud service, using the Abiquo UI, REST API, and integration points

• Abiquo let you manage resources in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, in an agent-free 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 has 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 that show how infrastructure is used and where VMs exist on the platform

• Abiquo meters all operations to measure and track all resources allocated or consumed. This lets you bill the usage of your cloud services

Abiquo CMP features

Abiquo offers cloud boosting features that work across private and public clouds and provide a true multi-cloud experience. Abiquo's features are adapted to the cloud providers but function independently of them.

Abiquo fulfills the Gartner CMP functional requirements in the areas of cloud management, and the following sections describe the cloud management platform and its features.

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Gartner®, Solution Criteria for Cloud Management Tools

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 managed services providers

The Abiquo platform has many built-in features to support managed service providers, which include the following.

• White-label the UI per reseller with support for separate access URLs

• Restrict user access to selected virtual datacenters

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

• Let users outsource systems that will still run on their virtual resources and are included in their single cloud bill

• Deliver datacenter services through restricted networks and reserved IP addresses

Abiquo features for resource management

For cloud resource management, to help you more easily manage complex technology without using different portals, Abiquo offers the following features.

• Simple, unified, provisioning, and orchestration that you can automate

• Centralized multi-cloud inventory views for administrators and users

  • Multi-cloud tag management to help you find and manage inventory across the cloud and drive a FinOps culture with multi-cloud 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 application configurations as blueprints (specs) that users can select, customize, and launch in any cloud

• Multi-cloud monitoring and observability with support for custom application metrics. Users can receive notifications and create automation based on monitoring data.

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Abiquo lets you manage and inventory cloud resources

Business features with multicloud budgets and cost control

For cloud budget and cost control, Abiquo has a clear centralized dashboard that displays all costs broken down by service and recommends how users can optimize their resources.

The billing dashboard helps make your cloud costs visible with estimated bills for all providers, and with multi-cloud budgets, you can easily apply spending limits for different providers, which can help to avoid stray resources that 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 other systems to create the right cloud to meet your business objectives. For example:

• Configure and launch systems from an ITSM integration

• 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, Microsoft Products, AWX, and more.

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:

  • Abiquo quick walkthrough of private cloud

  • Abiquo quick walkthrough of public cloud

• 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

• Get started with the Abiquo API

• Networking

• For guides to Abiquo features, see Abiquo features by version