What is CAS?

itopia's Cloud Automation Stack (CAS) is a powerful orchestration and management solution specifically designed to offer a cost-effective, highly-customizable Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) in Google Cloud.

With CAS, anyone is able to create and configure a VDI solution using Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) within minutes. If you're an advanced user, CAS offers a tremendous amount of flexibility to support specific needs for your environment. Unlike some managed VDI solutions, CAS delivers a standards-compliant infrastructure that you own; everything is deployed in your Google Cloud project, and you can configure it, extend it, or lock it down as you see fit.

What can CAS do?

In addition to the initial creation of the VDI environment, CAS offers powerful management features for your users, groups, and VDI environment. Some key features include:

• Automatic scaling your VDI environment as you add and remove users, keeping your costs down
• Assigning users to different VDI collections that can be configured with unique OS images and applications, user densities and resource allocations, and security settings such as clipboard redirection or local drive mapping
• Management of VDI host images, so you can easily update your VDI hosts with application updates and patches
• Simplified management of Active Directory users and groups directly in the CAS Admin Console
• Creating and administering network file shares and mapped drives for users
• Deploying to multiple geographic regions to provide low-latency, high performance remote access for your users across the globe. Cloud Desktops can be deployed into any GCP region, and users can be intelligently routed to their nearest region.

How does it work?

You can subscribe to CAS from the Google Cloud Marketplace. Once you have a subscription, you'll access the CAS Admin Console, where you can manage one or more deployments; each deployment is a standalone VDI environment in a unique GCP project.

CAS offers orchestration across several layers:

• Your Google Cloud resources, such as VM instances, VPC networking, and load balancers
• Creating and managing user and group accounts in Active Directory
• The RDS environment, including creating and configuring RD Collections, end-user session configuration, application assignment, and OS image management

Continue reading through this section to learn more about what CAS can do and how it works.