Whilst the debate on public, private, or hybrid cloud continues, it is clear that we should actually be thinking about the application itself, rather than defining the platform that it runs on. There are very clear application use cases for backends sat on a private cloud and for the use of public cloud for front end services or short term bursting. It is therefore vital that any cloud service is able to easily build hybrid applications.
Here at Abiquo, we have recently extended our supported infrastructure to include Amazon Web Services and additional hypervisors such as Hyper-V 2012 and Oracle VM. Choosing AWS for our first foray into public cloud was a no brainer. First of all it is clearly the market leader in this space, but secondly, and probably more importantly was that Abiquo is already built on the same networking concepts as AWS. This not only makes an integration “easy”, but also means that once integrated it will be easy to connect the private and public infrastructures making the utopia of a hybrid application possible. To briefly explain:
An Abiquo Virtual Datacenter (VDC) is defined by a datacenter (usually a physical location) and a single hypervisor technology. It gives the cloud users a defined set of resources, in a known location and on a known infrastructure platform. Within that VDC the resources can include three different network types:
1. Public networks, typically used for true public IP addresses
2. Private networks – isolated networks existing only in the cloud platform
3. External networks – allowing connectivity outside of the cloud platform to the corporate network and other services
When adding AWS resources, Abiquo continues to use exactly the same concepts, only a VDC is now defined by the AWS region. Within the VDC Abiquo is using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/ which aligns perfectly with Abiquo’s existing Private Networks. In both of these networks, because they are isolated, you have control over the IP address scheme that is used. Connect them up via a VPN and suddenly the possibilities for your application are endless. AWS Elastic IP’s are of course, the equivalent of Abiquo Public IP’s and the functionality is very similar, with the Abiquo UI making the purchase and provisioning of an AWS Elastic IP quick and easy.
The Abiquo UI not only simplifies the provisioning of new instances into AWS VPC’s, but it also provides a single view of the private and public resource, so you can see all of the components of your hybrid application in a single view.
Click to zoom
Abiquo UI: A single view of public and private cloud resources