Cloud Assembly provides a next generation blueprinting interface for crafting end user worklaods and driving platform automation. Combining an Infrastructure as Code approach with a declarative model allows Cloud Assembly to give you full visibility into the workloads you are deploying.
As time has moved forward, we continue to enhance this interface and provide new capabilities and ways to interact with the design canvas.
Blueprint Expressions Refresher
Last month, we published out a blog post highlighting Blueprint Expressions landing in Cloud Assembly. This capability allowed us to extend the functionality of blueprints by providing expressions inline that could be evaluated during provisioning. This makes our blueprints far more flexible and able to solve broader use cases
You can find a more complete list of expressions at in VMware Docs here that should help you in getting started.
Project Based Tag Enumeration
Previously, Cloud Administrators would need to know the Constraint tags that were available to a project before applying them. This led to potentially error prone situations where incorrect tags were provided which would trigger a failure in the blueprint. The user provisioning would receive a placement error indicating no matching constraint found.
This feature allows the blueprint to automatically provide the available tags that can be used as a constraint for a given object. These tags are project aware; so you will only see Constraint tags that are available to your project.
As you can see in the screenshot above, the drop-down list is easy to select from and apply constraint tags. This helps Cloud Administrators leverage tagging to deploy platforms across multiple clouds!
This capability was implemented directly from customer feedback. We’re constantly looking at how we can make the Blueprint interface easier to use!
Continuing to Expand Our Provider API
API’s have been added to provide enumerations of available Images and Flavors based on a specific project scope.
API interaction is a critical path for Cloud Automaton Services and we’re continuing to expand the API to make it more consumable and functional for users. Please review this post for a list of our current API endpoints and their associated Swagger documents! If you need to get an API Token, this post will help you out!
Wrapping up
We continue to enhance the capabilities within Cloud Assembly’s blueprint engine to make it easier to build blueprints that can extend your Software Defined Data Center into a Hybrid Cloud world. Stay tuned to this space for more information about changes as we continue forward!
As always, visit https://cloud.vmware.com to sign up for a 30-Day trial of Cloud Automation Services!
