interworks.cloud Platform provides a unified system to automate day-to-day management and enablement of cloud services addressing all critical operational challenges for provisioning, monitoring, metering, self-management, authentication and further integration into other applications in the provider’s systems. Integration of interworks.cloud Platform with any provisioning platform gives Service Providers the ability not only to setup and manage the services offered to their customers but to develop a unified system for product definition, billing customer subscriptions and accept payments. Service Management API enables integration of new services via implementation of a fixed set of API endpoints that support subscription and access management performed by the central platform. Any integration of the interworks.cloud Platform with provisioning platform follows certain principles and provides certain attributes.

Requirements

The following requirements should be met for the integration process of an application with interworks.cloud Platform:

• interworks.cloud Platform Platinum or Diamond edition
• Support Software as a service (Saas) licensing and delivery model
• Development of a RESTful API, coded in the language of your choice, implementing the required functionality that is necessary for translating interworks.cloud action to provisioning actions for the new application.
• Optional support for OpenID authentication

Technical Features

interworks.cloud Service Management API features a RESTful architecture, allowing you to code in the language of your choice.

Integration service is a RESTful API that should deliver a fixed set of methods supporting

• Service configuration
• Access management
• Subscription management
• Users management
• User Services management

In general, the following details and options are available for the integration service:

• JSON format is user for data on all requests and responses.
• All requests encoded using the UTF-8 character set.
• Access over HTTPS is optional, but important to prevent security vulnerabilities.
• Integration service’s authorization is handled via API keys, while SSL certificates are necessary for secure communication between interworks.cloud and Service Provider.
• Authentication process is optional and should be managed by integration service cooperating Service Management API methods that manage authentication info.
• There are no limitations regarding hosting of integration service.
• Billing operations are automatically performed by interworks.cloud Platform without any further integration.
• interworks.cloud Platform API can be used in order to support the information necessary for the integration of new services. 

Provisioning Engine

interworks.cloud Platform manages activation/deactivation of services and resources by orchestrating simple configuration for administration of services and customers info provided through BSS and Storefront modules.

Provisioning of services is triggered automatically by interworks.cloud Platform when one of the following actions is performed:

• Subscription Creation
• Subscription Activation
• Subscription Deactivation
• Subscription Cancellation
• Subscription Deletion
• Add-on Creation
• Add-on Update
• Add-on Cancellation

Provisioning engine is also responsible for provisioning of customers/users when one of the following actions is performed:

• Account Synchronization
• Account Deletion

Moreover, interworks.cloud Platform Storefront provides a powerful feature in "My Workspace" page that enables management of the Users and the Services assigned to them.

In order to successfully apply the above actions, provisioning engine should be configured with administrative info in order to properly call each external application for delivering a service to an end customer. In general this info provides the answers to the following questions:

• What urls should be called for each action?
• What authentication info is required by the external application?
• What kind of services supported?
• What quotas are supported for each service?
• What information is required for synchronizing an account?