Abiquo helps Admins use safe templates with Service Catalogues for Public Cloud

Public cloud services often come with a huge library of templates for virtual machines, but using these can be risky.

These image library templates are created by the provider themselves, by software partners who use the library as a form of promotion, or by members of their user community who upload an image that they think will be of interest to others.

Unfortunately, in that latter group are those who either by accident or by design leave back door access (perhaps with a poorly protected admin account), install Trojan horse software, fail to identify viruses or create insecure default configurations in the template.

With leading providers like Amazon issuing security advisories on templates, infrastructure admins managing cloud services for their IT and development teams are concerned about their exposure to security issues. This is backed up by research: in 2012 Researchers at France’s Eurecom technology institute, Northeastern University and the security firm SecludIT discovered that 22% of the 5000 machine images tested were still set up to allow a login by whoever set up the virtual machine’s software.

Users who work with these templates can put their data and platform security at risk, and they may also find they’re not using the software vendor’s best practise for configuring their solution. This can present problems for later upgrades, for application performance, and in solving dependencies in the underlying operating system and supporting software.

With the updated Abiquo Appliance Library, delivered with both the Abiquo Provider Edition for service providers and the Abiquo anyCloud service, cloud administrators can take control over the virtual machine templates available to their users, ensuring that they only deploy templates that have been tested and approved.

In the Abiquo Console, admins pick from public or private libraries to build a collection of tested and certified templates for their team for each public cloud region. By using Abiquo’s built-in template search, testing these templates, then adding them to the anyCloud App Library cloud admins can ensure that team members using anyCloud as their public cloud management system can only create virtual machines from these approved templates.

Abiquo even lets the cloud admin change the icon and description to clearly identify the template to team members.

See detailed instructions on the Abiquo wiki

Abiquo 2.6.7 helps cloud admins tune Nexenta storage for best performance

High Performance on a Cloud Platform comes from the correct usage of the infrastructure you are managing. Selecting the right servers, the right network and the right storage and knowing how to tune them to get the maximum result is key to tailoring your service to meet the needs of your customers.

For any disk-intensive service on a shared cloud platform, tuning your storage device configuration for your managed storage offering (like Abiquo’s persistent VMs and External Volumes) isn’t the whole story – your cloud management platform really should create new LUNs with the right block size.

Abiquo now lets Nexenta users set the default block size for zvols created with Abiquo’s self-service managed storage options to improve the IOPS performance of the system. In this new feature we have created a property (abiquo.storagemanager.nexenta.blocksize) that allows the cloud admin to define the expected block size value for the volumes created in a datacenter.

Using this property and basing the value on the Cloud provider experience, the service that they want to provide and hypervisor used, and even the OS used on the VMs, they can implement the block size that they require for volumes created by end users in Abiquo.

Abiquo’s goal is to help customers adapt their cloud management platform to meet their customer’ needs and to help them to offer differentiated services, and with this new feature included in the 2.6.7 release we continue to deliver on this promise.

Abiquo 2.6.7 is available immediately as a free update for existing Abiquo customers running version 2.x

Service Providers Under Attack From Amazon Look To Abiquo For Help

In brief: Managed Service Providers and hosting companies worried about customers moving to Amazon can now offer True Hybrid Cloud services with Abiquo’s new Provider Edition Cloud Management Platform.

Managed service providers (MSPs) and hosting companies are seeing customers test and move to Amazon’s Web Services platform, as Amazon’s 60+% year-on-year growth suggests. And it’s not just US companies under attack – Amazon has hinted that it may open a German Data Centre too.

To help these MSPs retain customers and build new offerings, Abiquo, creator of the Cloud Management Platform already used by top ranked MSPs to deliver their Virtual Data Center services, has today released its new Provider Edition – a single platform for MSPs to create True Hybrid Cloud services for Enterprise customers.

“Hosting companies and service providers tell us that their customers are starting to use public clouds such as Amazon and DigitalOcean, and that they’re worried about losing revenue and the ‘trusted partner’ status that they’ve worked so hard to gain” said Ian Finlay, VP of Product at Abiquo. “By implementing Abiquo Provider Edition they give their customers access to their choice of public cloud provider alongside their own high-quality on-premise cloud products.”

Gilles Samoun, CEO at Abiquo commented: “Time to market is a critical issue for service providers. The longer they wait to have a service in the market, the more they risk their customers going elsewhere. Our customers get to market in weeks, instead of taking months to develop on open source software. It’s also very easy to get a sales team ready to sell – a focus on business rather than implementation”.

This new release, with an elegant new user interface and simplified workflow, builds upon Abiquo’s proven solution to offer a True Hybrid Cloud platform – one portal, one reporting interface, one metering engine and one set of APIs across on-premise infrastructure and public cloud providers alike. A rich set of configuration options and integration points lets providers differentiate their product from competitors and serve their specific customer bases.

Samoun adds: “Customers can be confident that this new Provider Edition is proven at scale, having been running in our free Abiquo anyCloud SaaS service for some months”

Abiquo Provider Edition ships with support for Amazon, VMware ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, Oracle VM and Xen, with additional modules for Google Compute Engine, HP Cloud, Rackspace, ElasticHosts and DigitalOcean in the pipeline.

Abiquo Provider Edition is a free upgrade for existing customers, and can be sampled for free online at abiquo.com/anycloud.