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Concepts overview

An overview of conceptual information for the HPE Cloud Service Automation (CSA) key terminology, significant functionality, and important processes is documented here. CSA is a unique platform that orchestrates the deployment of computer and infrastructure resources, and complex multi-tier application architectures. CSA integrates and leverages the strengths of several datacenter management and automation products, adding resource management, service offerings, service design, and a customer portal to create a comprehensive service automation solution.

The CSA subscription, service design, and resource utilization capabilities address three key challenges:

  • The CSA Marketplace Portal provides a customer interface for requesting new cloud services and for monitoring and managing existing services, with subscription pricing to meet your business requirements.
  • The CSA graphical service design and content portability tools simplify developing, leveraging, and sharing an array of service offerings that can be tailored to your customers’ needs.
  • The CSA lifecycle framework and resource utilization features ease the complexity of mapping your cloud fulfillment infrastructure into reusable, automated resource offerings for on-time and on-budget delivery.

CSA Organizations: An organization in CSA determines a member's entry point into the cloud system and associates its members with services and resources.

Roles: Based on your role, specific areas of the Cloud Service Management Console are available to you.

Access Control: You can add or remove directory service groups or organization units to a role by associating the organization unit’s distinguished name to the desired role.

Resource Providers: Resource providers are management platforms that offer centralized control over the infrastructure and resources used in a cloud computing environment.

Components: Components are elements of service design, sequenced or topological.

Service Designs: To provide on-demand, automated service delivery, you create, configure, and modify service designs, which are the recipes for automating the cloud, and which are comprised of reusable service components. Service components and their relationships in a service design define the framework for creating the service.

Service Offerings: Service offerings encapsulate all the information consumers need to select the most appropriate services. Each service offering references a service design, which defines the service options and components of the service.

Service Instances: Service instances encapsulate all the details of the deployed service and its components.

The following concepts are described in the Cloud Service Automation Configuration Guide:

  • OO: OO (OO) is a process engine whose flows are executed by CSA. OO must be integrated with CSA. The flows that can be executed within CSA are imported automatically when an action is created.
  • Cloud Service Management Console: The Cloud Service Management Console dashboard is made up of predefined tiles that launch predefined pages.
  • Common CSA Tasks: Common tasks include launching the Cloud Service Management Console and Marketplace Portal, starting, stopping, or restarting CSA and the Marketplace Portal, encrypting a CSA password, and uninstalling CSA.
  • Marketplace Portal: Configure the Marketplace Portal to enable/disable global search, configure the Showback Report tile, encrypt a Marketplace Portal password, and configure security warning messages.
  • User Administration: User administration includes tasks such as allowing non-administrator users to start and stop CSA services and changing the out-of-the-box users.
  • Configure IPv6: Configure CSA to support IPv6 (both dual-stack and IPv6-only).
  • Common Access Card: Common access cards are used for user authentication and allow users to log in to CSA using a Personal Identity Verification card.
  • Single Sign-On: You can enable or disable single sign-on that is included with CSA. You can configure single sign-on for the Cloud Service Management Console and Marketplace Portal with almost any single sign-on solution. A specific solution for CA SiteMinder is also provided.
  • Database Administration: Database administration includes tasks such as configuring the CSA reporting database user if you did not configure it during installation, updating CSA database system or users and passwords, importing large archives, purging service subscriptions, installing the CSA database schema, and configuring CSA to mitigate frequently dropped database connections.
  • OO Manual Configuration for Designs: You can configure OO manually for topology and sequential designs without using the Cloud Content Capsule Installer.

See the following for more information about CSA:

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