[c-nsp] Automatic Rapid Provisioning Tool for Cloud Services

[Felix Nkansah]

Hi,

A telco is planning on moving into the public cloud services provision
business. They would provide collocation, dedicated hosting, cloud/virtual
servers, and hosted apps for customers.

The infrastructure part of the design is sort of sorted out for now
(network, security, servers, space, power, cooling, etc).

Concerning the cloud/virtual server service, they want an automatic rapid
provisioning application that allows customers to select the specs of
virtual servers they want and be dynamically created for them.

A customer at this portal would simply build a virtual machine by selecting
RAM, storage size, CPUs, OS, etc and proceed to a billing page.

After verifying payment, the system should automatically provision the
customer virtual machine on one of the hypervisors in the cloud, in minutes.
No human intervention at the provider side should be required.

The customer should even be able to increase the specs of his virtual server
at a later stage using a similar approach.

An example of this is provided by theplanet.com. See The Planet at their
cloud services page <https://www.theplanet.com/servers/server-cloud.aspx>.

I was wondering if you know of a readily available software or application
that can be integrated into the infrastructure to provide this experience?

Thanks. Felix