Organize, navigate, and manage your resources on IBM Cloud

The IBM Cloud continues to grow, providing more and more functionality through our offerings in the catalog. As we grow, we’re excited to bring you new functionality to help better navigate your workloads on our cloud. Here are just a small subset of the things we have done with the console to make working with the IBM Cloud easier.

Get started more quickly

If you haven’t yet, go create an IBM Cloud account at our home page. Once you’re signed up, we will set you up with a resource group called “Default” and a Cloud Foundry (CF) organization and space named “yourName@email.com” and “dev.” (Of course, you can rename those at pages linked from the Manage tab in the header.) All that’s left for you to do is build awesome things!

Get to your resources faster

Once you have started building on our cloud, you can now set your context in filters on the dashboard screen so you can always know right away what you are looking at. When you log out of the console, your filter selection will be saved for your next session, so you don’t have to worry about losing your spot. Thanks to this change, getting to the details for the things you care about from the dashboard is much clearer and simpler.

IBM Cloud dashboard filters

You’ll notice that the resource group filter has a selection called “All Resources.” Making that selection will return all of the resources to which you have access regardless of the resource group they are in. Thanks to fine-grained access controls, it is possible to get access to a specific service within a resource group without cluttering up your dashboard with the rest of the resources that may live there.

Organize and manage your resources

For the last three and a half years, the IBM Cloud has relied on CF role-based access management to organize and manage access to apps and services. As we continue to grow, we found that we needed some more specific functionality in terms of resource and access management. Now you can use regionless resource groups for certain services in the catalog, with more being enabled on an ongoing basis.

Reuse service instances across CF orgs and spaces

You may have heard of the new Cloud Object Storage service that was released on our public cloud about a month ago. It’s one of the first services to take advantage of resource groups, giving you some specific advantages as you use it and services like it. You’ll also notice when you deploy an instance of the service, you’re prompted to specify a resource group and a location depending on the plan you selected.

Catalog creation page for Cloud Object Storage on IBM Cloud

Since the service lives in that resource group, we made sure you can still connect it to your CF-based applications. That individual instance can be reused across all of your CF orgs and spaces by connecting to the apps or directly to the spaces in which you want the service to exist. When you do that, we create an alias of the service in the space itself so you can still take advantage of CF bindings. All of the usage for that service, no matter how many aliases it has, is aggregated by the main instance in the resource group.

For more information, check out our docs on resource groups and aliases. Keep on building!