Cloud Provisioning APIs with Self-Care Portals for Orchestration Software

1. Cloud Provisioning APIs with Self-Care Portals for Orchestration Software Syed Hashmi Founder & CEO Hosting Controller Inc.

2. Fulfillment through Orchestration

3. What are Provisioning APIs? Provisioning APIs are the ‘work’ that does all fulfillment behind any workflow engine. While the Orchestration can execute any complex work flow, it needs Provisioning APIs to be able to do any work on the network.

4. Anatomy of an Orchestration Engine • A Work Flow Creation Environment • A Work Flow Execution Environment • A Transport to Call Work APIs

5. Orchestration Complexity Orchestration requirements are getting complex in many dimensions.

6. Multi-Service Product Offerings Service Providers are going beyond their basic Internet Access or Telco Services. A fusion of service providers and cloud computing models is created in the world of multiple services.

7. Service Realization Models Each individual service may require multiple network functions to fully realize. Network functions may include:

8. Distributed Deployment Models Services may be delivered using deployed and brokered models.

9. Granular Monetization It is likely that the operator is going down to individual features in its monetization efforts and provisioning needs to keep up with that detail in its subscriptions and fulfillment.

10. Service Providers & Cloud Computing Such requirements are creating a fusion of traditional Service Providers with Cloud Computing.

11. Cloud Computing Characteristics NIST Definition • Resource Pooling • On Demand Self-Service • Rapid Elasticity • Measured Service • Broad Network Access

12. 1. Resource Pooling

13. Multi-Tenancy Choices • Virtualization • Access Control

14. Too Small Applications • Websites on a Shared Hosting Server • Email Domains with Few Mailboxes • A Single Web Application It may not be financially viable to create a separate virtualized container for each of them.

15. Too Large Applications • Unified Messaging (MS Exchange) • Unified Collaboration (MS SharePoint) • Unified Communications (MS Lync) It may not be technically viable to create a separate virtualized container for each tenant

16. Need for Access Control Hence for all the applications not falling within the sweet spot of virtualization, Multi-Tenancy or Resource Pooling needs to be realized in terms of Access Control.

17. 2. On-Demand Self-Serve This is identified as the second main characteristic of Cloud Computing.

18. Self-Serve Portal Requirements • Compatibility with Multi-Tenancy Architecture • Keeping Bounds within Allocated Quotas • Transactional Integration with rest of the System For these reasons, many times, self-serve portals need to be fully or partially rewritten for various applications.

19. 3. Rapid Elasticity Ability to provision/de-provision resources as required.

20. 4. Measured Service Measuring the Usage of the Service through Metering Agents.

21. 5. Broad Network Access

22. Hosting Controller Introduction Hosting Controller is a cloud hosting automation solution. Traditionally used by the Hosting Industry, with the fusion of Service Providers and Cloud Computing, it offers the missing link for complete order execution for cloud applications.

23. 1. Large Number of Supported Software Hosting Controller supports tens of the most popular cloud computing applications out of the box.

24. 2. Account Level Awareness It keeps track of the relation between all the provisioned resources and the user who owns them.

25. 3. Use Cases for Service Management It provides use cases for Service Management of all the supported software, such as:

26. 4. Application Dependent Access Control Uses the most appropriate multi-tenancy methodology for each application that it supports

27. 5. Multi-Tenancy Aware Self-Serve Portals Hosting Controller identified many features for self-serve portals in the cloud computing and provides rewritten self-serve portals for all the supported applications.

28. 6. Policy and Quota Enforcement In addition to basic self-serve provisioning, Hosting Controller also enforces policies and quotas through its self-serve portals.

29. 7. Feature Level Productization Hosting Controller allows down to a feature level productization and monetization of supported softwares.

30. 8. Usage Monitoring Agents For all services that it provisions, it also provides usage monitoring agents where needed, such as: • Disk space • Bandwidth

31. 9. Extensibility of the Platform It allows Service Providers to offer a Platform that can then be extended by the Customer itself. Hundreds of such applications are supported out of the box.

32. 10. Topology Hiding of Infrastructure It totally hides the topology of the underlying infrastructure from the Orchestration layer if needed.

33. 11. Provisioning IaaS, PaaS, SaaS Provides tens of APIs in each class of typical cloud service models

34. 12. List of Provisioned Resources Whether provisioned through Administration Portals or Customer Self-Serve Portals, HC maintains detailed lists of all the provisioned resources and their owners.

35. 13. Transactional APIs Hosting Controller offers APIs that, in addition to basic provisioning, does: • Quota and Policy Enforcement • Input Sanitization • Database Synchronization

36. 14. Dependency Resolution Hosting Controller resolves any domain specific dependencies before doing provisioning.

37. 15. Licensing Hosting controller provides detailed reports about actual resources consumed for licensing and compliance purposes.

38. 16. Resource Visibility It keeps track of all the Provisioned, Allocated and Consumed Resources.

39. 17. Reseller Channels Hosting Controller maintains a separate layer of B2B (Reseller) and B2C (Customer) channels. Service Providers may choose to provision umbrella quotas for resellers and they can then provision through their own self-serve for individual customers.

40. 18. Configuration Management Database Hosting Controller maintains a detailed configuration management database of all the services and resources.

41. 19. Operational Reporting Database offers detailed operational reports that can be integrated with any external BI system.

42. 20. Load Distribution Hosting Controller automatically distributes provisioning load onto multiple servers as per policy.

43. 21. Support for Windows and Linux Hosting Controller provides single set of exposed APIs that can be used to provision Windows and Linux servers on the back-end.

44. 22. Provisioning of Infrastructure Hosting Controller provisions Infrastructure or Virtualization on both Windows and Linux. URL

45. 23. Provisioning of Platforms Hosting Controller supports provisioning of multiple platforms that can be used by customers for multiple software applications. URL

46. 24. SaaS Provisioning Hosting Controller support tens of products (Windows and Linux) to be provisioned as SaaS. WindowsLinux

47. 25. Enterprise Applications Hosting Controller provides extensive support for Microsoft suite of enterprise applications provisioning including rewritten self-serve portals • MS Exchange • MS SharePoint • MS Lync • MS Dynamics CRM • Others

48. 26. Ongoing Patches Hosting Controller keeps on updating its APIs with newer versions of all the supported software. This allows Orchestration engines to remain immune to all ongoing upgrades.

49. 27. Business Models Backed by support of thousands of active hosts, Hosting controller offers support for business models that are most commonly demanded by the Service Providers.

50. 28. Raw APIs Hosting Controller offers transactional APIs that offer higher level functionality as mentioned above. But if needed by any Orchestration engine, it can expose Raw APIs doing all sorts of basic provisioning steps.