What is the IBM Cloud platform?

The IBM® cloud platform combines platform as a service (PaaS) with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to provide an integrated experience. The platform scales and supports both small development teams and organizations, and large enterprise businesses. Globally deployed across data centers around the world, the solution you build on IBM Cloud® spins up fast and performs reliably in a tested and supported environment you can trust.

The platform is built to support your needs whether it's working only in the public cloud or taking advantage of a multicloud deployment model. With our open-source technologies, such as Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and a full range of compute options, including virtual machines, containers, bare metal, and serverless, you have as much control and flexibility as you need to support workloads in your hybrid environment. You can deploy cloud-native apps while also ensuring workload portability.

Whether you need to migrate apps to the cloud, modernize your existing apps by using cloud services, ensure data resiliency against regional failure, or leverage new paradigms and deployment topologies to innovate and build your cloud-native apps, the platform's open architecture is built to accommodate your use case.

What's built into the platform?

As the following diagram illustrates, the IBM Cloud platform is composed of multiple components that work together to provide a consistent and dependable cloud experience.

• A robust console that serves as the front end for creating, viewing, managing your cloud resources
• An identity and access management component that securely authenticates users for both platform services and controls access to resources consistently across IBM Cloud
• A catalog that consists of hundreds of supported products
• A search and tagging mechanism for filtering and identifying your resources
• An account and billing management system that provides exact usage for pricing plans and secure credit card fraud protection

Whether you have existing code that you want to modernize and bring to the cloud or you're developing a brand new application, your developers can tap into the rapidly growing ecosystem of available services and runtime frameworks in IBM Cloud.

Setting up your account

If you're a developer and you're just trying out IBM Cloud, you can go straight to the catalog and browse the products that you'd like to explore and add to your Lite account. When you're ready to get started with an environment and get apps running in production, consider setting up the basics in your account:

• User access groups for organizing users and service IDs into one entity to make assigning access a streamlined process.
• Resource groups for organizing your resources to make assigning access to a set of resources quick and easy.
• Access policies for your access groups or individual developers who need IAM access policies or Cloud Foundry org and space roles.

For more information, see the best practices for organizing your resources and assigning access.

As a financial officer for your company, you might be interested in simplifying how you manage billing and usage across multiple teams and departments. With a Subscription account, you can create an IBM Cloud enterprise, which offers centralized account management, consolidated billing, and top-down usage reporting. An enterprise consists of an enterprise account, account groups, and individual accounts.

• The enterprise account is the parent account to all other accounts in the enterprise. Billing for the entire enterprise is managed at the enterprise account level.
• Account groups provide a way to organize related accounts. And, you get a unified view of resource usage costs across all accounts that are included in an account group.
• Similar to stand-alone accounts, accounts in an enterprise contain resources and resource groups, Cloud Foundry orgs and spaces, and independent access permissions.

For more information, see the best practices for setting up an enterprise.

IBM Cloud catalog

IBM Cloud provides a full-stack, public cloud platform with a variety of products in the catalog, including compute, storage, and networking options, end-to-end developer solutions for app development, testing and deployment, security management services, traditional and open-source databases, and cloud-native services. You can find all of these services on the Services tab in the catalog. The lifecycle and operations of these services are the responsibility of IBM.

The Software tab includes a growing catalog of software products, including Cloud Paks, starter kits, Terraform-based templates, and Helm charts. Even though you're responsible for the lifecycle management, deployment, and configuration of these software products on your own compute resources, you can take advantage of a simplified installation process that helps you to get up and running quickly.

The catalog supports command-line interfaces (CLIs) and a RESTful API for users to retrieve information about existing products, and create, manage, and delete their resources.

Creating resources

The resource controller is the next-generation IBM Cloud platform provisioning layer that manages the lifecycle of IBM Cloud resources in your account. Resources are provisioned globally in an account scope. The resource controller supports both synchronous and asynchronous provisioning of resources. Examples of resources include databases, accounts, processors, memory, and storage limits.

In general, resources that are tracked by the provisioning layer are intended to associate usage metrics and billing, but that isn’t always the case. In some cases, the resource might be associated with the provisioning layer to ensure that the resource lifecycle can be managed along with the account lifecycle. The resource controller uses IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authentication and authorization of actions that are taken against the provisioning layer.

Resource lifecycle management

The resource controller provides common APIs to control the lifecycle of resources from creating an instance to creating access credentials to removing access to deleting an instance.

Managing your resources

A collection of resources is managed by resource groups. A resource group is associated with your account. All IBM Cloud resources must be assigned to a resource group. When you create an account, a default resource group is created for you. All IBM Cloud IAM-enabled resources must be provisioned within a resource group. If you have a Lite account, you can have only one resource group. If you have a Pay-As-You-Go or Subscription account, you can create more than one resource group. If an account is suspended, the corresponding resource group is suspended as well, and all resources within the resource group are suspended.

Searching and tagging resources

The search service is a global and shared resource properties repository that is integrated within the IBM Cloud platform. It is used for storing and searching a cloud resource's attributes, and it categorizes and classifies resources. Resources are uniquely identified by a Cloud Resource Name (CRN) identifier. The properties of a resource include tags and system properties. Both properties are defined within an IBM Cloud billing account, and span across many regions.

This service also manages tags that are associated with a resource. You can create, delete, search, attach, or detach tags with the Tagging API. Tags are uniquely identified by a CRN identifier. Tags have a name, which must be unique within a billing account. You can create tags in key:value pairs or label format.

Monitoring your resources

Observability offers a single location where you can monitor and observe your applications and services in IBM Cloud.

With the IBM® Log Analysis with LogDNA service, you can add log management capabilities to your IBM Cloud architecture and you can manage system and application logs. It offers advanced features to monitor and troubleshoot, define alerts, and design custom dashboards. IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA is operated by LogDNA in partnership with IBM. For more information, see getting started with IBM Log Analysis with LogDNA.

The IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig service, allows you to gain operational visibility into the performance and health of your applications, services, and platforms. It offers a full stack telemetry with advanced features to monitor and troubleshoot, define alerts, and design custom dashboards. IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig is operated by Sysdig in partnership with IBM. For more information, see Getting started with IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig service.

Monitoring your account

Use the IBM Cloud™ Activity Tracker with LogDNA service to monitor the activity of your IBM Cloud account, investigate abnormal activity and critical actions, and comply with regulatory audit requirements. In addition, you can be alerted on actions as they happen. The events that are collected comply with the Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) standard. For more information, see Getting started with IBM Cloud Activity Tracker with LogDNA.