Overview – Self Service Portal for OpenStack
In this fast-paced world, a self-service cloud management platform could be the turn of the tide for the success of cloud business. Digital-first consumers prefer finding instant answers to their questions without waiting for support. They’d rather explore self-service portals for relevant tools/information than call customer support.
Self-service cloud management portals offer the following benefits:
- Reduces administrative workload
- Enhances customer satisfaction
- Reduces customer service costs
- Improves business performance and efficiency
- Seamless and quick access to self-service tools and information
- Streamlined user experiences
- Provides a competitive edge
Building an intuitive self-service cloud management platform is an efficient and cost-effective way to drive business growth. Moreover, it creates exceptional customer experiences.
By the same token, customers expect billing in the cloud industry to be flexible, and fast. Overall, the best cloud management platform tends to offer unified billing and chargeback solutions to cloud providers. A platform where they can seamlessly bill and invoice their clients.
In this post, we are going to learn what OpenStack is. As well as, how Stack Console offers a Self-service cloud management portal and billing solution for OpenStack:
What is OpenStack?
OpenStack is an open-source cloud computing platform. Commonly, it is deployed as IaaS in private and public clouds. Moreover, OpenStack houses interrelated components. These components manage large, multi-vendor hardware stacks of networking, storage, and computing resources across data centers. Also, teams can provision and manage these resources via APIs leveraging general authentication methods.
Launched in 2010, OpenStack began as a joint project by Rackspace Hosting and NASA. However, in 2012, it was entirely managed by a non-profit corporation called OpenStack Foundation. By the year 2018, nearly 500 organizations joined this OpenStack community project. Finally, in 2021, the foundation was renamed the Open Infrastructure Foundation.
Not only IaaS functionality but also OpenStack components offer service management. Further, with orchestration, and fault management services, as per your unique business needs.
OpenStack consists of various components, viz. Nova, Ceilometer, Keystone, Swift, Cinder, and others. Basically, these are designed to fulfill specific functionalities for cloud computing.
Key Features of OpenStack Ideal to Build a Cloud Infrastructure:
- Scalability
- Interoperability
- Flexibility
- Self-service
- Automation
- High Availability
- Monitoring & Metrics
- Networking
- Multi-tenancy
- Large Community & Strong Support
Who can use OpenStack?
OpenStack is used by a wide range of industries across the globe. Specifically, it is liked for its interoperability, security, and stability. Also, these include healthcare, government entities, universities, telecom service providers, retail, and so on.
Use Cases of OpenStack:
1. Public Cloud:
Hyper-scalers aren’t made for everyone around the globe. However, OpenStack is the best alternative for local service providers to sell their own public cloud.
2. Private Cloud
OpenStack allows enterprises to leverage cost optimization capabilities. Specifically, this is to help them bootstrap their own private cloud.
3. Containers
Extend OpenStack with a layer of a container on top. So, this will enhance the granularity of workloads across cloud-native applications.
4. NFVI (Network Function Virtualization Infrastructure)
Myriads of service providers worldwide use OpenStack as a founding element to build NFVI.
OpenStack Challenges
OpenStack is one of the best cloud computing platforms. Still, it lacks some functionality required to run a cloud business successfully. For example, it doesn’t feature service automation or a billing solution for customers.
That’s where Stack Console comes in!
Self-Service Cloud Management Portal for OpenStack / RedHat OpenStack:
Stack Console is built on top of OpenStack. Likewise, it is an authorized Red Hat Partner. Hence, it supports both- Open-source as well as Red Hat OpenStack versions. Especially this is to make cloud resource deployment and management easier.
Stack Console addresses operational challenges that CSPs and enterprise operators often face when selling new clouds.
Stack Console allows on-demand provisioning of OpenStack virtual resources via a self-service CMP. With a well-integrated, unified cloud management platform, service providers can offer self-service, billing, and payment services to clients. All this whilst optimizing costs, capacity, and usage.
Leveraging automation, CSPs, Telco, and data centers can centrally manage and provision full lifecycle operability of OpenStack resources. This includes faster deployments, scaling resources, and seamless upgrades.
Billing Solution for OpenStack:
Likewise, Stack Console offers a feature-rich billing solution for OpenStack. Thus, enabling Telco, CSPs, and data centers to handle OpenStack billing and chargeback scenarios for their customers. Further, businesses can even monetize XaaS (Anything-as-a-Service) cloud. We offer brand-building capabilities to help CSPs sell enterprise clouds in different ways.
Key Features of Stack Console’s Self-Service CMP and Billing Solution for OpenStack:
- Self-service provisioning of OpenStack resources
- A unified console for end-to-end visibility into OpenStack resources
- Complete automation for provisioning, orchestration, inventory & classification, monitoring & analytics, backup, and disaster recovery.
- End-users can easily create new instances in no time
- End-users can scale cloud resources up or down. Likewise, modify configurations as per their needs- via one platform
- OpenStack Cloud billing and Subscription software with OpenStack Management
- Fast, accurate, and reliable OpenStack billing in pay-per-use
- Unified Chargeback of OpenStack within budget
- Hourly, monthly, and yearly prepaid and postpaid billing methods
- Multi-currency & wallet options
- Set billing frequencies for OpenStack resources
- Subscribers can derive financial reporting through monthly account statements or transactional records
- 100% White label software for OpenStack. Customize and sell as your own brand with custom UI//UX designs
- Support for credit limit-based billing
- Reseller management console
- Payment models: Charge for Usage / Charge for Subscription / Both
- Support for value-adding services. Such as Kubernetes, DNS Management, Block Storage, Snapshot, Auto Scaling, Load Balancer, etc.
- Expert Consultancy Team
- Authorized Red Hat Partner. Supports Open-source OpenStack as well as Red Hat OpenStack to make everything manageable.
Why Choose Stack Console?
Stack Console leverages the power of OpenStack to help CSPs, Telco, MSPs, and others manage and provision new clouds, coupled with cost optimization and security.
In summary, we help local cloud businesses build and provision a highly-competitive alternative to hyper-scale cloud providers, such as Azure and AWS without the high expenses and time required for the development.
Conclusion
Stack Console offers a full-fledged Self-Service Cloud Management Platform for RedHat OpenStack. As well as, Integrated Billing Solution for OpenStack. So, it makes the cloud easily accessible and affordable to end-users. Additionally, we unify scalability, flexibility, self-service, and automation in a single console. Thus, helping cloud businesses sell custom enterprise clouds with 100% white labeling.
Altogether, the self-service portal for OpenStack is feature-rich, aiming to elevate user experiences. Hence, service providers can set up billing cycles for easy invoicing. Moreover, they can manage subscriptions, support tickets, usage, orders, etc. for all cloud services- via a single console.
Want to know more about Stack Console OpenStack-based cloud services? Get in touch with us right away!