Public Cloud Gateway overview

The Public Cloud Gateway is a web application that provides an OpenStack API compatibility layer so that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), IBM® SoftLayer, and non-IBM supplied OpenStack, work like the standard OpenStack, Cinder, and Glance instances.

The Public Cloud Gateway is automatically installed as part of the IBM Cloud Orchestrator installation process. You can deploy and manage virtual machines and storage across both private and public clouds, for example, Amazon EC2. Public Cloud Gateway calls the management APIs of the Remote Cloud to perform the OpenStack API.

Figure 1. Overview

The Public Cloud Gateway provides a subset of the available OpenStack API. For more information, see OpenStack API support.

The invocation of the management APIs of the Remote Clouds might go through an HTTP/HTTPS proxy. For information about the configuration of a proxy, see Remote Cloud API proxy configuration.

Access to the provisioned virtual machine instance is either through a VPN connection the on-premises IBM Cloud Orchestrator instance to the management network of the provisioned virtual machine instances or through the internet.

The Remote Cloud capabilities together with the Public Cloud Gateway configuration define which connectivity to the provisioned virtual machine instance is used.

The configuration of the VPN between the IBM Cloud Orchestrator on-premises instance and the remote clouds must be done out of band depending on the available or chosen hardware devices available on the on-premises site. The Business Process Manager node requires access to the remote cloud through VPN.

Review the list of capabilities and limitations for the Public Cloud Gateway.