Organizing existing resources by using a project

You can use a project to organize and track resources across accounts, which can help large enterprises separate management accounts from workload accounts and applications. Separating management accounts from workload accounts reduces the number of users who need access to your workload accounts, which makes those accounts more secure. For example, you can gather resources that are related to a particular workload across your development and production accounts into a single project in an administration account. By doing so, your resources remain deployed in their respective accounts, but you gain an at-a-glance view of those resources in your project.

This is an experimental feature that is available for evaluation and testing purposes and might change without notice.

An enterprise account with an administration account and two business unit account groups A and B. Account group B contains an administration account and two other accounts, workload accounts A and B. The group B administration account includes a project with two configurations that contain resources from workload accounts A and B. — An administration account that tracks resources from business unit accounts

Within an enterprise account architecture, tracking resources in a project can help a user in a business unit administration account manage separate workload accounts and applications. The resources exist in different accounts, for example, workload account A, and workload account B. But by adding resources from workload account A and B to a project in the administration account, the resources are visible from the project in the administration account as well.

Within a project, you can further refine groups of resources by adding them to different configurations. Consider grouping the resources based on their function. For example, within the same project, you can add one configuration that contains the resources for your infrastructure on your development environment, and another configuration for the resources on your production environment.

Watch and learn

Prefer to see it in action? Check out the following video to learn how to organize existing resources in your project by using the console.

Video transcript

A new feature is available in IBM Cloud that you can use to organize your resources by using a project.

Within your project, you can now add existing resources from other accounts.

In your project, go to the Resources tab and click Add to select the resources that you want to organize in your project.

First, provide the authentication credentials for the account that contains your resources. Then, click Next to select the resources that you want to organize in your project. You can search for resources by filtering on the Location, Service, or Tags.

Select each resource that you want to organize in your project and click Add. The resources that you added to your project are now listed on the Resources tab.

Moving forward, we’re exploring ways to provide meaningful data in your project, such as usage and cost information.

Before you begin

Make sure that you are assigned the following access in the account that contains your project:

The Editor role or greater on the IBM Cloud® Projects service.
The Viewer role on the resource group for the project.

You must also have an authentication method to grant your project access to the account that contains your resources. You can use an API key or secret or you can use a trusted profile to grant your project access. Make sure that the API key or trusted profile has the following access:

The Viewer role for All Identity and Access enabled services. You can allow access to all resources, or scope the access to a select few.
The Viewer role for the resource group that contains the existing resources.

Adding existing resources to a project

To add existing resources to a project, complete the following steps:

In the IBM Cloud console, click the Navigation menu icon > Projects and create or select a project.
In the project, go to the Resources tab and click Add.
In the Authenticate section, select an authentication method that you want to use to authenticate with the target account that contains your resources.
In the Select resources section, select the resources that you want to organize in your project and click Add.

Resources that are in an IBM Cloud® Schematics workspace or were already added to another configuration can’t be added and don't display in the list of resources. Some resources might not be included in the list if the authentication method was scoped to specific resources, as opposed to all of them.

The resources that you added to your project are listed on the Resources tab.

Removing IBM Cloud resources from a project

To remove resources from a project, complete the following steps:

In the project, go to the Resources tab and find the resource that you want to remove.
Click the Actions icon > Remove.
Click Remove to confirm that you want to remove the selected resource from the project.