Cloud Director App Launchpad helps VMware Cloud Providers to offer their tenants a curated portfolio of applications for their consumption, without them having to know anything about VMware Cloud Director based? with the release of App Launchpad Cloud providers can elevate their portfolio from IAAS,CAAS to Applications as a Service.Cloud Provider can Offer in-house applications suited to verticals or solution areas, App Launchpad will help providers in offering all this and also making it very easy for all customer personas like DevOps, Developers, IT admins to access and deploy applications to VMware Cloud Director
App Launchpad For Providers
VMware Cloud Providers can configure App Launchpad to work with the following types of applications:
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Bitnami Applications
- Bitnami offers pre-configured, tested, and supported open source applications. Service Providers that subscribe to the Bitnami Community Catalog can access these applications from the VMware Cloud Marketplace also.
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Apps from VMware Cloud Marketplace
- VMware Cloud Marketplace is a service that will allow our partners to easily publish solutions in a variety of formats – whether it’s containers or appliances or even SaaS, it offers a range of ISV applications that a Service Provider can add to VMware Cloud Director and make available for consumption to their tenants using App Launchpad.
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In-house applications
- Service provider can upload their own in house developed application vApps and can make it available to their tenants to consume with in seconds. providers will upload their own solution in AppLaunch Pad catalog and using an API call update catalogs description and logo and make it available to their choice of tenants using App LaunchPad.
Provider Onboarding Cloud Market Place Applications
To onboard Bitnami applications to App Launchpad, Cloud providers will have go to VMware Cloud Market Place and import the applications to the newly created Launchpad provider organization.
Provider Onboarding In-House Applications
To onboard custom, in-house applications, Providers will have to go to the content library of the newly created Launchpad provider organization and create catalog items and upload their applications. Provider will also need to add logo and description to these applications using an API, please refer code.vmware.com for API calls.
Provider Tenant Access & Application Management
To make applications available to tenants, App Launchpad automatically creates a catalog of applications and publish it to a VMware Cloud Director organization. Provider can also configure the default application deployment settings at the VMware Cloud Director organization and organization virtual data center levels.
Using App Launchpad, Providers can control the visibility of application catalogs to tenant users , can define various T-Shirt sizes for the application, control the visibility of catalogs.
Provider can remove an application catalog from a VMware Cloud Director organization, the users in the organization can no longer use the applications in the catalog.
App Launchpad For Tenants
Using App Launchpad, Various Tenant personas like developers, IT admins , End users and DevOps engineers can launch applications to their organization virtual data center in few seconds and start consuming immediately. Few of the key features are:
- Curated catalog of applications for tenants
- 1-Click app Deployment for tenant users
- Automates VM creation, networking, firewalling, assigns IP , Tenant user does not need to worry about underlying infrastructure required to provision and access apps, just need to go to App LaunchPad – My Applications and here they can get access information and basic operations like:
- Open Console
- IP address
- Actions like – power on/off , delete etc..
- For tenant consumers No knowledge of underlying infrastructure required to provision and access apps.
How to Start ?
It is very simple and easy process to install App launchpad , here is App Launch Pad Installation Pre-requisite:
NOTE – Linux Based Operating Cent OS 7 & Cent OS 8 are only Supported as of now.
For Detailed installation steps , please refer App Launchpad documentation here, i will also write few more posts on this topic.
App Launchpad is a free component for VMware Cloud Director, and doesn’t necessitate the use of Bitnami catalogs, providers can use their own appliances, so go ahead and give it a try, start delivering a PAAS solutions to your customers.
VMTECHIE 