Automate ITOps: announcing foundational APIs for the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform

[HPE_Experts]

Organizations struggle to manage IT resources because humans are holding them back. But – did you know that the HPE GreenLake platform enables you to automate operations via APIs to achieve velocity, get consistent results, reduce costs, and scale? – And it’s available today!

Today, many enterprises are pursuing hybrid cloud, as our understanding of the multiple benefits of a hybrid cloud strategy becomes more evident and relevant.

Among the many benefits that you will realize, you can anticipate experiencing:

• Increased flexibility and scalability that enables your business to move faster
• Decreased cost from being able to run each workload in the most appropriate environment
• Heightened security and strict compliance that comes with keeping sensitive data on your premises.

But running workloads in public clouds, private clouds, and traditional infrastructure does increase complexity, and in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, keeping your IT environment running smoothly is a big job – as you well know.

Many organizations like yours struggle to manage their IT resources because, well, their humans are holding them back. We humans are great at creative tasks and problem solving, but for repeatable tasks, modern homo sapiens should be the backup plan – not your first option.

The reasons? First of all, we humans are slow, and time is money. We’re also inconsistent, capable of doing the same thing differently – and occasionally wrong – each time. We’re expensive, and this is especially painful when you’re paying us to fix those errors we commit. And we don’t scale, at least not as fast as your digital transformation demands.

Ease the pain with automation

Today, HPE is proud to announce that the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, our unified management plane for hybrid cloud, now offers application programming interfaces (APIs) for many common services. These are designed to help you automate your IT operations and reduce your dependence on those slow, expensive, and unreliable humans.

Automation helps you achieve velocity by performing manually intensive, repeatable tasks much faster than humans can. It gives you more consistent results by removing human variance and error from your processes. Automation also reduces your costs by enabling you to focus your best people on more strategic work. And it improves your ability to scale by reducing the number of staff you must hire and train as your IT environment grows and changes.

API strategy for HPE GreenLake

HPE GreenLake is our portfolio of cloud and as-a-service solutions that bring the cloud experience to your apps and data – wherever they live – from edge to cloud. Part of the cloud experience is the ability to integrate your systems to your cloud provider via their APIs, so we built HPE GreenLake with an API-first vision. Our intent was to create a platform with a simplified user interface that can also be implemented programmatically with the API.

HPE GreenLake provides a unified API architecture with standards that cover not just the platform but also the cloud services that run on it.

HPE GreenLake APIs:

• Conform to the OpenAPI 3.0 specification. This makes them easy to learn, discoverable by code, and accessible with any programming language.
• Use a single endpoint. All calls go to https://global.api.greenlake.hpe.com.
• Use a single token to access all APIs.
• Are built to be secure and highly available.
• Are RESTful for flexible implementation.

HPE GreenLake Developer Portal

The portal is your resource for programmatic access to both th HPE GreenLake platform and HPE GreenLake Cloud Services. You can access it here.

The how-to documentation includes a getting started guide, tutorials, best practices, and more to help you put all of the well-thought-out pieces together to accomplish your goals. When you’re ready to dive in and code, the portal provides an API reference for endpoints, request and response formats, and other technical specs, plus sample code to help you jump-start your project in your preferred language.

You’ll also find the HPE Developer Community is a place where you can collaborate with other developers in forums, webinars, and other venues to help and be helped. The portal gives you the latest updates, with access to the newest releases and announcements of coming attractions.

What’s new as of November 2023

We’re introducing APIs for foundational, common services on the HPE GreenLake platform, along with a developer portal to support you with documentation, code, community, and more.

Here’s a summary of what you can expect to find on the portal:

Workspace management. Learn about the details of a workspace, and discover how to fully create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) on managed service provider (MSP) tenant workspaces. You can also access a full CRUD roster of users, enabling you to send invitations to join a workspace.

Authorization. Familiarize yourself with the details about a permissions role, or full CRUD on user assignments to roles.

Devices and subscriptions. Add and modify hardware devices in a workspace, initiate subscriptions, and assign to devices.

Locations. Create, read, and update physical locations used for shipping and support.

Audit log. Read details about user actions for accountability.

Wellness. Get a list of wellness events via searches and filters, organize them with tags, read event details, pull KPIs, and open support cases.

What does this mean for you? 

These new APIs open several use cases to HPE GreenLake customers and partners. An enterprise onboarding to the HPE GreenLake platform can get through that process much more efficiently by adding users, permissions, devices, and subscriptions programmatically. And that automated onboarding of devices and subscriptions also comes in handy whenever a tech refresh is initiated, or you purchase a large number of new devices.

For example, you might use the wellness API to integrate with your existing ITSM tools in order to alert your help desk staff to take action, when needed, and use the audit log API to pull in forensic information when doing root cause analysis for any incident.

Partners also benefit from the new APIs. MSPs can automate onboarding for new customers, from configuring a workspace to adding users and permissions.

And if you didn’t already know, the new APIs I’ve mentioned are not the only ones for HPE GreenLake. HPE GreenLake for Compute Ops Management launched last year with its own API, which is documented on the HPE GreenLake Developer Portal just like the platform APIs.

What comes next?

Sorry, my human friends. Automation is where smart organizations are headed.

But – if you’re ready to get your hands dirty with some code – you can apply for access to the APIs, some of which have limited availability at this time. Don’t forget to join the HPE Developer Community so that you can get help from, and give help to, your peers in other organizations.

Stay tuned over the coming months for more APIs! We’ll be publishing APIs to cover many more existing platform capabilities, as well as more HPE GreenLake cloud services. And as new foundational services are added to the platform going forward, you can expect that they’ll come with APIs.

If you’d like to learn more about HPE GreenLake APIs, both for the platform and HPE Compute Ops Management, please visit the HPE GreenLake Developer portal.

Meet HPE Blogger Paul Zinn

Paul is a Product Marketing Manager for HPE GreenLake. In over thirty years in the enterprise software industry with mature companies and startups, he has held roles both for building products and for bringing them to market. Before joining the Marketing team he led a Product Management team that built usage and cost analytics for HPE GreenLake. Currently his primary focus is product marketing for the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, and he also works to make HPE GreenLake messaging clear and consistent across the company. In his off hours he makes music with the Sacramento, California Americana/rock band The Nickel Slots.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn!

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