Overview

The IBM Cloudability Enablement deployable architectureCloud automation for deploying a common architectural pattern that combines one or more cloud resources that is designed for easy deployment, scalability, and modularity. is the easiest way to add your IBM Cloud account or enterprise to IBM Cloudability (formerly Apptio Cloudability). With your IBM Cloud account added to Cloudability, you can use it to track and analyze your IBM Cloud expenses.

What is IBM Cloudability?

IBM Cloudability is a cloud financial management platform that provides visibility and optimization capabilities across all major cloud providers. The tool offers features such as cost allocation, budget management, rightsizing recommendations, and customizable reporting. With the help of IBM Cloudability, you can help maximize your companies cloud investments and align cloud usage with business objectives. Visit the IBM Cloudability product page to learn more.

Why use the Cloudability Enablement deployable architecture?

The IBM Cloudability Enablement deployable architecture performs the necessary steps to start tracking your IBM Cloud expenditure within Cloudability. These are some of the key benefits:

  1. Faster and more consistent deployment: deployable architecture's run as a pre-configured template that uses terraform. This terraform template ensures that the necessary steps are performed in the correct sequence to configure the different components, which reduces configuration errors.

  2. Reduced complexity: By abstracting away many infrastructure details, this deployable architecture reduces the number of inputs. This means that less of your time is spent gathering information and synchronizing information between the two services. Instead, your IBM Cloud connection to IBM Cloudability can be managed in a central place.

  3. Security and Compliance: Follows IBM Cloud's recommended best practices, which are maintained through regular version updates to help ensure that your workloads are secure and compliant.

  4. Customization: The deployable architecture inputs default to the recommended best practices. However, by using the various configuration options, the deployment can be adjusted to meet your business needs.

What actions does this deployable architecture perform?

Architectural Diagram
Architecture Diagram

The IBM Cloudability Enablement deployable architecture performs the following steps to add your IBM Cloud account to Cloudability:

  1. Creates or uses an existing resource group in the target IBM Cloud account
  2. Creates the following services in the target resource group and location:
    • IBM Cloud Object Storage Bucket in a newly created or existing IBM Cloud Object Storage Instance
    • Key Protect encryption key is used for encryption of the Object Storage bucket with your own key by using a newly created or existing Key Protect instance
  3. Enables daily billing report exports to the newly created storage bucket
  4. Grants Cloudability access to read the billing reports from the IBM Cloud Object Storage bucket
    • If the account is an enterprise: Grants Cloudability access to read the list of child accounts in the enterprise
    • An IAM Custom role is used so Cloudability is only granted the minimum required access.
  5. Creates context-based restrictions (not shown in diagram) which restricts access to the Object Storage bucket to be only from IBM Cloud Billing, Cloudability, Schematics (used for provisioning by Projects. Not shown in diagram) and any other custom provided zone.
  6. Adds the IBM Cloud account or enterprise to IBM Cloudability

Getting started

If you don't have access to an IBM Cloudability account, then you need to create one. Once you have access to a Cloudability account, then configure access to run the deployable architecture, and deploy the cloud resources.