What is IBM Cloud Satellite and how does it work?

With IBM Cloud Satellite, you can create a hybrid environment that brings the scalability and flexibility of public cloud services to the applications and data that run in your secure private cloud. To achieve this distributed cloud architecture, Satellite provides an API-based suite of tools that you can use to represent your on-premises data center, a public cloud provider, or an edge network as a Satellite location. You fill the Satellite location with your own host machines that meet the minimum host requirements. Then, these hosts provide the compute power to run IBM Cloud services, such as workloads in managed Red Hat OpenShift clusters or data and artificial intelligence (AI) tools like Watson.

Your Satellite location includes tools such as Satellite Link and Satellite Config to provide additional capabilities for securing and auditing network connections in your location and consistently deploying, managing, and controlling your apps and policies across clusters in the location.

For more information, see the Satellite product page.

Where is Satellite available?

Because you bring your own compute host infrastructure to your Satellite location, you choose where to host that infrastructure. To monitor malicious activity and apply updates, those compute hosts are managed by an IBM Cloud multizone region that IBM Cloud Satellite supports. Select the region closest to your compute hosts to minimize round-trip latency between IBM Cloud and your Satellite location.

For more information, see Supported IBM Cloud locations.

Is my location setup highly available?

The IBM Cloud Satellite service architecture and infrastructure is designed to ensure reliability, low processing latency, and maximum service uptime. Every location is managed by a highly available Satellite control plane that consists of a management plane and worker nodes, distributed across three availability zones within one IBM Cloud multizone metro. For an overview of potential points of failure and options to increase the availability of your location and control plane, see High availability for IBM Cloud Satellite.

What happens if my Satellite control plane becomes unavailable?

Every location is securely connected to the IBM Cloud multizone region that manages it through the Satellite Link component. The Link component runs in your control plane and serves as the primary gateway for all communication between your Satellite location and IBM Cloud. When your Satellite location loses connectivity to the IBM Cloud multizone region, existing location workloads continue to run uninterrupted, but configuration changes and update rollouts to services and apps in your location are blocked until connectivity is restored.

For an overview of your options to make the Satellite control plane more highly available to prevent connectivity issues with your IBM Cloud multizone region, see High availability for IBM Cloud Satellite.

Does IBM support third-party and open source tools that I use with Satellite?

See the IBM open source and third-party policy.

Why can't I install extra software like vulnerability scanning tools on my host?

To add your own server as a host in your Satellite location, the host must meet certain compute, storage, networking, and system requirements. These requirements specify the Red Hat software packages that must be installed on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts. Other software packages that make modifications to the hosts, including vulnerability scanning tools such as McAfee or Qualys, cannot be installed on the hosts. But you can install read-only software such as OpenSCAP on the hosts before attaching them to your location.

The reasons that you cannot install extra software on the hosts relate to IBM 's responsibilities to manage multiple aspects of the Satellite hosts for you, such as installation, access, and maintenance.

Installation: The Satellite team tries to keep the host requirements to a minimal level so that many servers across infrastructure providers can meet the requirements to become Satellite hosts. By limiting the number of possible software packages, Satellite reduces instability and conflicts during installation tasks such as bootstrapping each host so that all hosts across Satellite locations have a consistent set of images and container platform software. This consistency also helps you develop applications and deploy Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud services that work across your environments.

Access: For security purposes, Satellite restricts external access to hosts, including SSH. Many extra software packages require access to or from the host, so extra software packages are not allowed to be installed.

Maintenance: IBM provides software updates that you choose when to apply to the host. Because IBM is responsible for providing these updates, you cannot install extra software that is not managed by IBM. Extra software also uses mores CPU, memory, and disk storage resources on the host, which impacts the amount available to your Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud services and applications that run on the hosts.

What am I charged for when I use IBM Cloud Satellite?

IBM Cloud Satellite provides a convenient way for you to consume IBM Cloud services in any location that you want, with visibility across your locations. For more information, see Pricing.

Can I estimate my costs?

When you create a resource such as a location or cluster, you can review a cost estimate in the Summary pane of the console. For other types of estimates, see Estimating your costs.

Keep in mind that some charges are not reflected in the estimate, such as the costs for your underlying infrastructure.

Can I view and control my current usage?

See View your usage and Set spending notifications for general IBM Cloud account guidance.

What are the terms of the service level agreement?

See the IBM Cloud terms of service and the Satellite additional service description.

Satellite Infrastructure Service is IBM-operated and as such, is covered in the IBM Cloud Satellite cloud service terms with additional information outlined in the IBM Cloud Additional Services Description.

What compliance standards does the service meet?

IBM Cloud is built by following data, finance, health, insurance, privacy, security, technology, and other international compliance standards. For more information, see IBM Cloud compliance.

To view detailed system requirements, run a software product compatibility report for IBM Cloud Satellite.

Compliance also depends on the setup of the underlying infrastructure provider that you use for the Satellite location control plane and other resources. You are responsible for compliance of your own infrastructure.

IBM Cloud Satellite implements controls commensurate with the following security standards:

• International Organization for Standardization 27001 (ISO 27001) — information security management
• ISO 27017 — security controls for cloud services
• ISO 27018 — protection of personally identifiable information (PII) in public clouds

What IBM Cloud services can I use with Satellite?

For a complete list of IBM Cloud services that you can deploy to your Satellite location, see Satellite-enabled IBM Cloud services.

Each service in the catalog has the following constraints:

• Availability is limited to Satellite locations managed from select IBM Cloud regions, such as Washington, DC or London. See the service documentation for supported regions.
• Service-specific limitations for use in Satellite apply.

What managed add-ons can I use with Red Hat OpenShift clusters in my Satellite location?

See the Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud documentation.

Does IBM have an infrastructure on-premises compute storage option if I don't already have my own?

Yes, IBM Storage Fusion HCI is a purpose-built, hyper-converged architecture that supports managed service deployments with IBM Cloud Satellite. It's designed to deploy bare metal Red Hat OpenShift container management and deployment software alongside IBM Storage Fusion software.