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Chapter 5.
27
User Services Overview
In addition to the physical and logical infrastructure of your cloud, and the CloudPlatform software and
servers, you also need a layer of user services so that people can actually make use of the cloud.
This means not just a user UI, but a set of options and resources that users can choose from, such
as templates for creating virtual machines, disk storage, and more. If you are running a commercial
service, you will be keeping track of what services and resources users are consuming and charging
them for that usage. Even if you do not charge anything for people to use your cloud – say, if the users
are strictly internal to your organization, or just friends who are sharing your cloud – you can still keep
track of what services they use and how much of them.
5.1. Service Offerings, Disk Offerings, Network Offerings,
and Templates
A user creating a new instance can make a variety of choices about its characteristics and capabilities.
CloudPlatform provides several ways to present users with choices when creating a new instance:
• Service Offerings, defined by the CloudPlatform administrator, provide a choice of CPU speed,
number of CPUs, RAM size, tags on the root disk, and other choices. See Creating a New Compute
Offering.
• Disk Offerings, defined by the CloudPlatform administrator, provide a choice of disk size for primary
data storage. See Creating a New Disk Offering.
• Network Offerings, defined by the CloudPlatform administrator, describe the feature set that is
available to end users from the virtual router or external networking devices on a given guest
network. See Network Offerings.
• Templates, defined by the CloudPlatform administrator or by any CloudPlatform user, are the
base OS images that the user can choose from when creating a new instance. For example,
CloudPlatform includes CentOS as a template. See Working with Templates.
In addition to these choices that are provided for users, there is another type of service offering
which is available only to the CloudPlatform root administrator, and is used for configuring virtual
infrastructure resources. For more information, see Upgrading a Virtual Router with System Service
Offerings.