As simple as ABC – The Abiquo Brooklyn Catalog

Guest blogger: Alex Heneveld, CTO at CloudSoft

We recently had the pleasure of hosting a visit from Abiquo; pleasurable because it quickly morphed into a hackathon with Xavier Fernandez which yielded a nicely working integration. A long flight gave me the chance to clean it up and make a Brooklyn pull request (#813) with the net result that Abiquo is now (for all you TL;DR vics) a first-class target for the Brooklyn Catalog.

The session started with the usual describe-and-demo. However it is always the surprises which are most interesting so here’s what surprised me:

• Abiquo has their own API. Is this madness given the momentum of the *-stack bandwagons? I don’t want to have to work with yet another API. But it turns out I don’t have to: they’ve got bindings for jclouds and other client libraries which meant, and as we’ll talk about below, it worked with a lot less fuss than I’m used to.
• It’s a very nice GUI. Pretty is always nice, but more importantly it had clearly been through a few rounds of real usability feedback. The little things that usually irk me had all been solved, like searching for resources … acting on several VM’s at the same time … and hanging on a slow connection. (The down-side is that it’s Flex not HTML5/JS/REST, but Abiquo are on the case so look out for a new version when 3.0 is released later this year.)

• It’s multi-cloud. Multi-hypervisor is old news, but there still are not many cloud platforms which can front many locations. Add in wide-area, use a datastore efficiently (Redis, in Abiquo’s case), and include locations which are someone else’s cloud with a different API, and the list is very short. Location is a first-class concept, and the current snapshot version supports AWS locations. OpenStack and CloudStack targets around the corner, hopefully.

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Are choices ‘clouding’ the IT department?

As consumers, we are exposed to an infinite amount of choices in what we buy, wear and eat – whether this is a consequence of globalization or our dependency on the internet is irrelevant, but it has now begun to represent a real challenge for the IT department or administrator.

For years, IT has created efficiency and reduced the support overhead by creating “standard” environments and platforms, effectively creating an underlying IT infrastructure with one size fits all mentality. With the rise of cloud technologies and services, the IT consumer is already presented with the choices that they want. IT has found it hard to adapt and become the enabler in providing that same choice to their customers.

The IT department still needs to consider its own costs and efficiency. It is not as simple as creating multiple service offerings for the consumer. In the modern world, where the IT consumer expects choice and self-service the IT department needs a single platform that enables them to deliver just that! The technology world has transformed, there are various combinations of choices in compute, storage, networking and services that software will provide on top of that underling infrastructure.

The IT department needs a single management platform that abstracts the consumer from the underlying complexity in those infrastructure technologies but still allows them to choose which is the right combination of technology for the task in hand, or service that they are creating. IT simply needs a single platform that offers multiple tiers of service.

We are naturally transitioning to a self-service cloud enabled world where we expect to have choices in order to customize our interaction with IT. We have that choice already through our smartphones and tablets, but more and more IT consumers expect to be offered real choice in the IT services that they consume.

For example, my development team are in the early proof of concept stage of a creating a new application. At this stage, they are in short development cycles, and their core requirement is agility. They don’t need high performance servers or the latest SSD storage.

As the development of the application matures they need to start considering the performance and availability that is required in the production and their core requirements change. By creating multiple tiers of service the first environment would be on a low tier, using commodity hardware and storage, and perhaps a free hypervisor. As time goes on, its time to move the application to a higher tier in the stack. A hardware and software stack that mirrors production.

The key here is providing the choice to the IT consumer through a single platform which enables them to make choose the service tier that they want through self-service.

So to answer my earlier question, are choices clouding IT, to that I would have to say no. More choice = more flexibility.