Chapter 5. Assigning Cloud Services – Plans, Add-Ons, Tenant Accounts, and Subscriptions

In the previous chapter, we built VM Clouds and IaaS services for our WAP-based cloud. In this chapter, we will move ahead toward completing a ready-to-use cloud solution by learning about methods of assigning these services to tenants. We will cover planning and the implementation of cloud plans to which tenants need to be subscribed to use services. We will also cover add-ons, the tenant's subscriptions, and the tenant's user account management.

We will be covering the following topics in this chapter:

• Windows Azure Pack plans and add-ons – overview and planning

• Creating and managing Windows Azure Pack Cloud plans and add-ons

• Creating and managing tenants' user accounts

• Tenant subscriptions – an overview and management

Windows Azure Pack plans and add-ons – overview and planning

Windows Azure Pack plan, also known as hosting plan, is a mechanism of assigning cloud service offerings to tenants as per their deal or contract agreement considerations, such as a variety of services, quota, the amount of resources available, the quality of service, and so on. The cloud provider creates and configures the plan as per the deal or cloud offering strategy; tenants subscribe to the plan to get access to configured cloud service offerings. A plan usually contains a collection of services to be made available along with defined restrictions or limits.

A single plan can be subscribed by multiple tenants having the same requirements. A plan may consist of multiple resource provider services, such as VM Clouds (IaaS), websites and Service Bus (PaaS), Databases (DBaaS), or other custom offerings.

Tenants cannot access cloud services without subscribing to at least one plan. They may subscribe to multiple plans as per requirements...

Creating and managing Windows Azure Pack plans and add-ons

Windows Azure Pack cloud administrators can create and manage plans or add-ons using the WAP management portal. Before creating a plan or an add-on, a cloud provider must plan and decide the number of plans and add-ons for their configuration.

Creating a WAP plan

Let's carry out the following steps to create a WAP plan:

1. Log into the WAP management portal for administrators.

2. Navigate to the plans workspace.

3. Click on CREATE A NEW HOSTING PLAN.

   

4. Provide a friendly name for the hosting plan; by default, this name will be visible to tenants while signing up.

   

5. Select the services or the type of resource providers to be made available in the plan.

   

6. Select any add-on to be linked to the plan. This can also be configured later.

7. Click on the checkmark to create the plan.

8. By default, any plan gets created in a private state. It has to be changed to Public manually to make it available for tenants.

9. Click on the NAME plan to start configuring the plan for...

Creating and managing tenants' user accounts

While signing up on Windows Azure Pack tenant portal, tenants must provide an email address and password. This creates an account for tenants in Windows Azure Pack directory (ASP .Net or ADFS as applicable).

Tenant user accounts can be created in Windows Azure Pack in two ways:

• They can be created by a tenant's self-sign up operation

• They can be created by a cloud administrator

Creating user accounts for tenants

The following steps are to be carried out for creating user accounts for tenants:

1. Log into the WAP management portal for administrators.

2. Browse the user accounts workspace.

3. Click on CREATE A NEW USER.

   

4. Provide user details including email address, password, and a plan to subscribe. Note that a plan made public will only be available here.

   

5. Tenants can use this account now for logging into the tenant portal and using services under the selected plan.

An administrator can perform additional operations on user accounts such as:

• Suspend account

• Reset password...

Tenant subscriptions – an overview and management

A subscription is an object that defines a tenant's access to a plan and is used to identify the tenant's resources and access across the cloud. A subscription is created when tenants sign up for any plan or add-on.

A subscription is one-to-one mapping between tenant user and plan access. One subscription can be attached to only one plan, whereas single tenants can have multiple subscriptions. Windows Azure Pack provides self-services access to tenants for creating and managing subscriptions as defined by cloud administrators. In this topic, you will learn about subscription management from a cloud administrator's point of view; the tenant's point of view will be covered in the next chapter.

Subscription management operations – administrators

The Windows Azure Pack administration portal allows management operations on subscription, which can be performed by a cloud administrator. The following management operations can be performed:

• Viewing a...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned the ways of delivering cloud services to tenants created in the previous chapters. We covered the planning of Windows Azure Pack hosting plans and add-ons along with their implementation. You also learned about user account management for tenant's accounts and subscriptions.

At the end of this chapter, we have our cloud solution ready with IaaS services configured with plans for the tenants' usage. In the next chapter, we will access this solution as a cloud tenant, which is also known as a customer. We will experience the cloud services provisioning and management operations.