What is actually under the hood of your cloud? Here you’ll read some in-depth technology considerations to cover when you are evaluating your virtual resources.
Virtual resources are portions of the capacity of the physical resources that behave like physical resources, but are provisioned on demand rather than in advance of demand. Types of virtual resource include virtual machines, disks, and snapshots.
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The cloud market is big – the cloud services market just passed $6 billion in quarterly revenues and the growth rate is increasing – are you making the most of this market? This month’s newsletter we look at the crown jewels of cloud, in-depth Flexiant product videos and more.
Today’s Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator Deep Dive focuses on Jade APIs that provide the entire Business Logic layer for our cloud management software. Jade is the top level management structure in the software stack. Jade contains and manages the following elements:
Jade talks to the Cluster Coordinator (Tigerlily) to then control each individual cluster of resources.
Jade provides three APIs:
1. A user API, used by end users for manipulating virtual resources on the platform (available by REST and SOAP)
Jade’s user API allows end users of the platform to manipulate their own virtual resources. Authentication is by user and customer, meaning that a user who is so permitted can manipulate resources of different customers using the appropriate authentication credentials.
Administrators can use the user API, authenticating as the administrator but passing the UsernameToken SOAP header (SOAP) or X-AssumeToken HTTP header (REST) set to the authentication username (the login username, a slash, and the customer UUID) of the customer concerned; see Authenticating to the APIs for more details.
2. An admin API used by administrators for various administrative functions (available by REST and SOAP)
Jade’s admin API provides a means for users with administrative access to perform administrative functions on the platform. Users with administrative access are:
Jade provides an interface to allow authenticated administrators to perform administrative functions only within the Billing Entities they are authorized to use. For instance, they can:
Jade’s admin API does not permit administrators to manipulate the virtual resources of customers directly. In order to manipulate customer resources, administrators should use the User API, authenticating as the administrator but passing the UsernameToken SOAP header (SOAP) or X-AssumeToken HTTP header (REST) set to the authentication username (the login username, a slash, and the customer UUID) of the customer concerned. For more details see Authenticating to the APIs.
3. An open API, available unauthenticated for retrieving objects prior to authentication (available by REST only).
Jade’s open API provides a means for unauthenticated users to retrieve in a read-only manner certain resources without authentication. For instance, to allow the sign-on screen in Skyline to retrieve login graphics, blobs are retrieved which are marked as public.
Getting Started
You can read more about the Key Jade Concepts available, and see also Authenticating to the APIs. To get started with Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator, get in touch now.
Service providers delivering cloud require a user-friendly solution to load balancing across their servers. At Flexiant, we continually aim to deliver against our service providers’ requirements, and so today we launch a fully integrated, multi-tenant Load Balancer as a Service.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator load balancers are deployed in redundant groups. These in turn can route traffic across backend servers according to various algorithms, such as round robin, or whichever server has the least number of connections on it.
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Just out, 451 Research has released an Impact Report on Flexiant ‘Flexiant Points to the Cloud Pipeline Opportunity’ suggesting that Flexiant has arrived. William Fellows writes The 451 Take:
“Flexiant has historically sold to telcos and MSPs creating cloud services, but looks to have arrived at the next stage of its corporate development. Its direction of travel is toward a single technology platform or stack combining its Orchestrator and Concerto offerings (as well as offering stand-alone products). This will strengthen is proposition as the market seeks different kinds of services to meet different application needs. It will likely need an additional larger investment in order to meet the demands of an increased pipeline opportunity – either in the form of additional funding or an acquisition.”
