Cisco Intercloud Fabric Provider Platform (ICFPP) simplifies the complexity involved in working with a variety of public cloud APIs, and enables cloud API support for service providers who currently do not have API support. Cisco ICFPP provides an extensible adapter framework that allows integration with a variety of provider cloud infrastructure management platforms, such as OpenStack, CloudStack, VMware vCloud Director, and any other API that can be integrated through a software development kit (SDK) provided by Cisco.

Currently, service providers have their own proprietary cloud APIs—such as Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure—that give customers limited choices and provide no easy method for moving from one provider to another. Cisco ICFPP abstracts this complexity and translates Cisco Intercloud Fabric cloud API calls to cloud platform APIs of different provider infrastructure platforms, giving customers the option of moving their workloads regardless of the cloud API exposed by the service provider.

Many service providers do not provide cloud APIs that Cisco Intercloud Fabric can use to deploy customers' workloads. One option for these providers is to provide direct access to their virtual machine manager's SDK or API, such as vCenter or System Center, which exposes the provider environment and is not a preferred option for service providers due to security concerns. Cisco ICFPP, as the first point of authentication for the customer cloud when requesting cloud resources, enforces highly secure access to the provider environment. In addition, Cisco ICFPP provides the cloud APIs that are required for service providers to be part of the provider ecosystem for Cisco Intercloud Fabric.

As the interface between the Cisco Intercloud Fabric from customer cloud environments and provider clouds (public and virtual private clouds), Cisco ICFPP provides the following benefits:

• Standardizes and brings uniformity to cloud APIs, making it easier for Cisco Intercloud Fabric to consume cloud services from service providers that are part of the Cisco Intercloud Fabric ecosystem.

• Helps secure access to a service provider's underlying cloud platform.

• Limits the utilization rate per customer or tenant environment.

• Provides northbound APIs for service providers for integration with existing management platforms.

• Supports multitenancy.

• Monitors resource usage per tenant.

• Meters resource usage per tenant.

This guide describes Cisco ICFPP deployment options, installation requirements, installing Cisco ICFPP in VMware and OpenStack environments, and configuring Cisco ICFPP for multiple-node clusters.

For additional information, see the following documents on Cisco.com:

• Cisco Intercloud Fabric Provider Platform Release Notes

• Cisco Intercloud Fabric Provider Platform Administrator Guide

• Cisco Intercloud Fabric Provider Platform Troubleshooting Guide