Integrating Cloud Services
Get familiar with the integration points provided by the platform and the step-by-step procedures for
integrating your applications into the APS ecosystem.
To integrate an application, you should develop an APS application that is entirely or partially shipped
as an APS package. In the simplest case, if we omit the UX (user experience) design
process, the APS application development consists of the following steps.
Pay attention to the following key points of the development process.
- You are aware of the business goals, that is you know exactly which Application resources
you are going to provide to customers. They can be tenants (also called management contexts or management environment),
user accounts, storage, virtual machines, etc. Respective APS types must describe resource schemas.
- You know exactly which API methods are exposed by the Application for operating the resources. You will need this
to create an APS connector with backend scripts implementing the provisioning logic.
- For each APS type, you need to declare and configure an APS application service exposed
as a URL on the APS connector. Using this URL, the hosting platform will manage Application resources through
the APS connector.
- In the control panels of the platform, the providers and customers will need visual control elements to manage Application
resources. Therefore, you need to design the APS application UI.
- The key components mentioned above, including general data of the Application, services,and UI components,
must be declared in the APS metadata.
- Once the above development steps are completed, you should package the project files into an APS package
that will be a single compressed file. The file name looks like
<AppName>-<Version>-<Release>.app.zip
(for example, VPScloud-5.0-1.app.zip
) that shows the Application name (VPScloud), Application version (5.0),
and package release (1).
- You can use the APS package locally on your platform, as well as publish it in
the APS catalog to make it available to all providers.
You need to go through the package certification process to publish your package.
If you are new in integrating cloud services to the APS ecosystem, go subsequently through the
following steps.
- Get familiar with the development process following the simple Get Started hands-on demo project.
It will walk you through the steps of setting your APS development environment and then
through all steps of developing and testing an APS application.
After completing the demo project, you will feel confident in the specifics of the APS application life cycle.
- Study the integration points the platform exposes on the APS bus and learn how to use them
by following the more complex how-to demo processes as explained in the Integration Procedures.
Then, you can come back to the Integration Procedures each time you need to identify a platform integration point to use
in your project and follow the corresponding how-to integration procedure to implement it.