The Apps Library is where the cloud administrator will make it easy for the cloud users to use the infrastructure that they are providing. And it is easy for the administrators to upload templates as OVAs, template disks, or ISO disks, for example.
In each private cloud datacenter, the administrator should configure an Apps Library based on an NFS Repository. This is where the administrator will provide the virtual machine templates for creating virtual machines. For Service Providers the Apps Library enables the provider to offer appliances and applications to their customer. For Enterprises the Apps Library provides a central, controlled image repository so that only approved images can be deployed onto the infrastructure.
The cloud administrator may allow enterprise admins to upload their own templates to the Apps Library for their users. If the enterprise is a reseller, the cloud administrator can allow them to share templates with the tenants they manage. And users with the appropriate privileges can create clones of their virtual machine disks as instance templates.
Administrators can also create application blueprints called virtual appliance specs by saving the configuration of a group of virtual machines to the Apps library. The user can then automatically create a new virtual appliance directly from the blueprint.
Screenshot: A template and clones of virtual machine disks created from the template (instance templates)
In private cloud datacenters, cloud administrators can set allocation limits to ensure that no single enterprise uses all the repository space. Repository usage is accounted and can be billed to each enterprise.
For customers running multiple Abiquo datacenters, Abiquo has a template mobility feature that can export from a private cloud datacenter to another datacenter and supported public cloud providers.
Abiquo also provides a sample Remote Repository hosted on Amazon S3 from which images can be managed and downloaded to the local (data center) repositories. This Remote Repository provides sample images for testing purposes.
In public cloud regions, the Apps library enables you to filter and search for public cloud images. It also allows you to import the image details into the Abiquo public cloud region Apps library, which is a template definition cache. Here you can modify the way that Abiquo will present the templates to your users. However, Abiquo will maintain a link to the original public cloud image. The approved templates cached in the Apps Library are easily available for users to deploy. Users can also create instance templates to clone the disks of their virtual machines running in the public cloud region.