Cloud Automation ServicesIn previous posts on VMGuru.com we introduced VMware’s new SaaS-based Cloud Automation Services, Cloud Assembly, Service Broker and Code Stream.

In our next series of posts Erik and I will explain several technical details of the different Cloud Automation Services and how to use them, starting off with Cloud Assembly and Service Broker. Later we will dive into the world of CI/CD with CodeStream.

The first part of Cloud Automation Services, Cloud Assembly provides an abstraction layer across multiple clouds using a Cloud API which makes it possible to create declarative templating constructs, which VMware calls ”Blueprints”. Blueprints can deploy cloud agnostic resources (compute, storage, network etc.) across clouds. At this moment Cloud Assembly supports Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, VMware Cloud on AWS and vSphere (with or without NSX-V/T).

Service Broker delivers a common catalog that aggregates content in native formats from multiple clouds and platforms including services designed in Cloud Assembly. Service Broker provides simple, self-service access to multi-cloud infrastructure and application resources from a single catalog, without requiring proprietary tools. With Service Broker , operations teams can more effectively govern resource access and use and enforce security, deployment and business policies across multi-cloud environments.

Here’s a list of topics which we want to write about in our new Cloud Automation Services blog series. This list is not finalized and new topics will be added. So come back regularly to check for new posts!

1 – Deploying a Data Collector

2 – Setting up a Cloud Zone including Flavor- & Image Mappings and Storage- & Network Profiles

3 – Creating your first Cloud Assembly blueprint

4 – Integrating Puppet with Cloud Assembly

5 – Using inputs in your Cloud Assembly blueprint

6 – How to create a Cloud Agnostic blueprint in Cloud Assembly

7 – How to use remote access authentication in your Cloud Assembly deployments

8 – Customizing your CAS deployment using Cloud-Init

9 – Setting component dependencies in Cloud Assembly

10 – Versioning blueprints in Cloud Assembly

11 – …

 

P.S. If you want to evaluate Cloud Assembly or other Cloud Services, go to VMware Cloud.