API Only Access to On-Premise Applications

Transforming on-premise workloads into a ‘Private Cloud’ is usually the first step towards an organization’s Digital Transformation journey.

Once this is achieved, their on-premise applications behave much the same as other applications in public clouds. This further enables the organization to choose the right mix of strategy between all private, go all into multiple public clouds or the right mix between private / public clouds into a ‘Hybrid Cloud’ strategy.

This is achieved by putting in a ‘Cloud Controller’ or ‘Control Panel’ in front of the on-premise applications. Hosting Controller is one such cloud management tool. The main purpose of such a tool is to provide APIs for all ‘Control Actions’ .

The Legacy On-Premise Scenario

In the pre-cloud legacy scenario, all organizations engage an IT team that uses the control plane interface for the underlying software applications to execute the control actions like provisioning, purging and resizing new resources.

The Legacy On-Premise Scenario

Take an example of Microsoft Exchange. An estimated 78% of all organizations use it as their primary email server. It offers ‘Powershell Scripting’ as its primary control plane interface. For routine tasks as onboarding new users, removing old ones, setting security credentials, upsize / downsize of mailboxes and other resources, organizations’ IT staff develops their own set of ‘scripts’.

Newer scripts are developed on an ad hoc basis as new requirements emerge or previous requirements change. The quality of scripts ultimately depends on the quality of the coders. Most organizations suffer compromising quality issues leaving in security holes and all types of problems. Instead of vendor lock in, they suffer employee lock in as the domain knowledge increases and the level of undocumented process and scripts increases.

The Newer Private Cloud Scenario

As mentioned before, a cloud control panel (like Hosting Controller) will transform the on-premise workloads into a private cloud and its first and foremost purpose is the provide APIs for all control actions.

Some of the benefits of using APIs are:

RESTful interface for all APIs

RESTful interface for all APIs

While the underlying control plane interface varies from application to applications (e.g. PowerShell in case of Microsoft Exchange), the northbound interface offered by APIs is based on REST. This enables the organization and its IT staff to easily consume these APIs in multiple different ways.

Authentic Scripts for all Common Tasks

Behind the APIs the scripts are authentic. They are written by Hosting Controller’s development team which has years of experience with every single application we support. 

Authentic Scripts

Many a times the scripts have gone through different types of ‘validation’ by the parent organization like Microsoft in the case of Microsoft Exchange.

In the case of any bug or security vulnerability or performance issues, the issues surface with other users and are fixed in time. All in all, the experience of any organization using Hosting Controller APIs in terms of the quality of underlying scripts is many times better as maintaining any medium to large sized internal IT team.

GUI Based Dashboards

GUI Based Dashboards

Hosting Controller comes with GUI based dashboards which still use the underlying APIs. They are intuitive interfaces to be used by end-users of any technical competence directly. The organization can enhance the GUI within provided interfaces of Hosting Controller by adding new menus or grouping together common actions.

OPs to DevOPs

OPs to DevOPs

The operations teams transform to be DevOPs spending most of their time automating common tasks and improving workflows rather than repeating the same scripts manually over again and again. Read more.

Levels of Self-Serve

End-users with little to no technical knowledge can self-serve themselves using the GUI dashboards. IT teams can self-serve consuming REST APIs in different ways.

Levels of Self Service

Part of Larger Cloud Controllers

Many large organizations already use cloud controllers from other large vendors like VMware, IBM, HP, Citrix and others. Many such controllers do not support the range of software applications supported by Hosting Controller, for example the range of Microsoft enterprise products like MS Exchange and multiple web applications. If the organization is using any such application, it can use Hosting Controller as the cloud controller in front of those applications and consume Hosting Controller’s provided REST APIs into their large cloud controller.

Part of Larger Cloud Controllers

Audit Trail of all configuration changes

Audit Trail

Since all configuration changes go through provided APIs, a detailed audit trail is maintained providing valuable insight into the current state of the underlying system.

Auditable Configurations

Organizations demand auditable configurations. It cannot be achieved by any ad hoc script based access to the underlying system. With Hosting Controller and its APIs, it is guaranteed that the changes are done through the APIs and are available in the audit trail. It also guarantees that all tasks are either completed and committed or rolled back successfully without leaving any incomplete provisioned resources.

Conclusion

Having APIs for all control tasks and restricting access through those APIs is the first step in transforming on-premise applications into a Private Cloud. This in turn is the first step towards any ‘cloud-first’ digital transformation journey for any organization. Hosting Controller is one such control panel that provides APIs for all control actions for tens of supported software applications.

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