Concerto Frequently Asked Questions

Flexiant Concerto

What is Flexiant Concerto?

Flexiant Concerto is a multi-tenant hosted platform, which enables service providers to launch multi-cloud application lifecycle management services.

Who can benefit from Flexiant Concerto?

All service providers including MSPs, hosting companies and telcos, who want to open new revenue streams by delivering multi-cloud application lifecycle management to software developers, IT professionals or DevOps.

What are the main benefits of using Flexiant Concerto?

Flexiant Concerto’s easy to use user interface provides extensive functionality around application lifecycle managements across multiple clouds. Service providers can provide an effective toolset to the fastest growing market segment in the cloud, next generation application developers to profit from this opportunity.

End users benefit from the instant access to hundreds of application blueprints and the ability to consistently deploy these across different cloud providers to achieve the best cost vs. performance ratio.

Is Flexiant Concerto a hosted solution or is it deployed on site?

Flexiant Concerto is a platform hosted by Flexiant. Flexiant Concerto is fully multi-tenant and can be white-labeled for each service provider that has full visibility and control over its set of customers. That means service providers can sign up (as opposed to buying software licenses) for the Flexiant Concerto service to launch their own branded Concerto-powered control panel without buying any hardware. In fact, service providers can select which cloud providers to offer to their customers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Compute Engine (GCE), Rackspace (v1,v2), Digital Ocean, Gogrid, Joyent, CloudSigma, IBM SmartCloud, Linode – of course – all those that are powered by Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator .

How much does Flexiant Concerto cost?

Flexiant Concerto is currently free of charge, for unlimited use, until January 2015 when we will then release pricing.

Features 

What are the main features of Flexiant Concerto?

Flexiant Concerto capabilities include many features and functions that can be deployed across multiple clouds and consumed as-a-service. With the goal of guaranteeing consistency independent of the chosen cloud providers, Flexiant Concerto’s features are abstracted from the infrastructure layer. In fact, Flexiant Concerto provides a comprehensive set of application-focused tools, from load balancing and application performance-based autoscaling to DNS management and File Delivery Network. One of the most interesting capabilities lies in the extensive use of Chef for application blueprinting within Flexiant Concerto. This enables application blueprints to be deployable on multiple clouds, without relying too heavily on provider-specific OS images.

Which public clouds does Flexiant Concerto work with?

Flexiant Concerto works with all of the major public cloud providers including:

  • AWS
  • Rackspace
  • Digital Ocean
  • Joyent
  • Instant Servers
  • Linode
  • GoGrid
  • Arsys
  • Cloud Sigma
  • IBM Smart Cloud
  • Acens
  • Google Compute Engine
  • Microsoft Azure

If there is a public cloud provider you would like to integrate with that isn’t in the list above, please contact us and we can look at integrating with a specific driver.

Which cloud management platforms (CMPs) does Flexiant Concerto work with?

Flexiant Concerto works with all of the major cloud management platforms including:

  • Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator
  • OpenStack (Diablo)
  • VMware vCloud Director
  • VMware vCloud Automation Center
  • Eucalyptus
  • Joyent SmartDataCenter
  • OpenNebula

If there is a cloud management platform you would like to integrate with that isn’t in the list above, please contact us at and we can look at integrating with a specific driver.

How does Flexiant Concerto fit with Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator?

Of course, Flexiant Concerto supports Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator as one of the available infrastructure back-ends. Any service provider who stands up Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator in its data centers will be eligible to be one of the cloud infrastructure providers included in the Flexiant Concerto technology platform.

How does Flexiant Concerto’s provide application consistency and portability?

Flexiant Concerto provides an extensive library made of hundreds of application blueprints. These are delivered by Chef recipes that will download, install, build and configure applications executing a repeatable set of instructions. Cloud providers just need to provide base OS images (e.g. Ubuntu 14.04 or Windows Server 2012R2) while the application is taken care by Flexiant Concerto, at the same way and with the same result across all supported providers and CMPs.

How does Flexiant Concerto’s DNS geo-localization and load balancing work?

Flexiant Concerto provides an integrated DNS service. This allows your customers to automatically register and publish their virtual servers into the DNS and make sure their websites are served from the location with the least latency possible. Configuring more than one virtual servers with the same DNS record will make Flexiant Concerto round-robin over the set of active servers nearest to the user in order to respond.

Does Flexiant Concerto also include network load balancing?

Yes. Flexiant Concerto provides an integrated multi-tenant network load balancer, which Flexiant Concerto will use to automatically distribute workload across a pool of servers (server array). The Flexiant Concerto load balancer also supports SSL termination, thereby offloading the heavy lifting of handling encryption from your application server.

Do you extend your functionality by integrating with external partners?

Yes. Extending functionality via partners is a key goal of Flexiant to allow us to focus on our core value, while providing our customer with a best-of-breed eco-system of applications and technologies.

As of today, Flexiant Concerto integrates with the following:

Use case / Functionality Partner
Application performance monitoring New Relic
Log analysis Sumo Logic
Network monitoring Boundary
Business intelligence Mix Panel