Glossary terms for Schematics

This page provides the terms and definitions for Schematics objects, such as action, Agent, Blueprint, Catalog, Inventory, Job, Template or Modules, and workspace.

The following cross-references are used in terminology:

See refers you from a non-preferred term to the preferred term or from an abbreviation to the spelled-out form.
See also refers you to a related or contrasting term.

Actions

Automate resource and application management with Ansible playbooks.

Agents

Extends Schematics ability to reach user infrastructure.

Agent

Method or service to bind Schematics Agent with Schematics workspaces.

Agent service

A collection of Agent related microservices deployed on the Agent infrastructure. It is composed of the following microservices.

Jobrunner microservice
Sandbox microservice
Runtimeworkspace Job

Agent Infrastructure

A Kubernetes cluster used to deploy and run the Agent services. It is composed of the following resources.

VPC infrastructure as public_gateways, subnets
Kubernetes Service as vpc_kubernetes_cluster
IBM LogDNA instance

Catalog

A collection of automation templates that can be ordered from IBM Cloud. You can onboard your Terraform automation to the IBM Cloud catalog, and share the catalog of templates in a controlled manner with your team by using IAM permissions and policies.

IBM Cloud catalog already supports a collection of IBM owned and Third party developed automation in the catalog. The automation is used to provision infrastructure and softwares by using Helm charts, Kubernetes Operators, OVA images, Cloudpak automation. Schematics workspaces are used to run these automations.|

Inventories

A collection of cloud resources that are used as target for running the Ansible playbooks, modules, or roles.

Resource inventory

A resource inventory can be defined by using a static inventory file, or dynamically retrieve to your target IBM Cloud resources from Schematics workspaces in your IBM Cloud account.

Jobs

A job maintains a record of the execution of tasks or operations for Schematics Workspaces, Actions, Agents and resources. You can see these job records appearing in the context of action, and workspace. The job record describes the status of the Job, inputs used to run the job, outputs produced by the job and the console logs.

Templates or Modules

Automation code written for provisioning and configuring a cloud infrastructure by using Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Operators, and so on., in the IaC language.
You can use Schematics to run the automation templates by using workspaces or Actions.

Modules are reusable IaC automation code that can be used to assemble an automation template

Workspaces

A platform to build the infrastructure, provision resources, and deploy applications with the support to multiple environments. It has feasibility, or privilege to access by using Git private or public repositories with a secured access token.

Schematics workspaces

A platform to build the infrastructure, provision resources and deploy applications with support to multiple environments. It has feasibility, or privilege to access by using Git private or public repositories with a secured access token.

Jobs

The status of the provisioned resource is in inactive, progress, active, or failed results of the Schematics object by running create, plan, or apply commands.

Resources

Maps to the provisioned Terraform resources within the infrastructure.

Readme file

Refers to the demonstration of an example template with steps to prerequisites, provision resources with limitations, and steps to run the Terraform template with support of IBM Cloud Schematics.

Settings

Common area to edit values of the variables so that new Terraform template can be generated or re-imply with new changes.

Workspace

A platform to build the infrastructure by using open source tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Open Shift cloud to manage various cloud infrastructure resources.