We are excited to announce the release of IBM Cloud projects and cost estimation.

Projects are a named collection of configurations that are used to manage related resources and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployments across accounts. The cost estimator is a platform service that provides cost estimates for Terraform-based products. ​

In today’s fast-paced digital world, enterprises face numerous challenges when it comes to managing complex workloads and ensuring their security and continuous compliance. These challenges include managing multiple cloud environments with thousands of resources, ensuring continuous compliance with industry regulations and protecting against evolving cybersecurity threats.

The impact of these challenges on enterprises includes the inability to manage and scale, along with weeks of organizational effort to work and log between accounts and environments.

What is IBM Cloud projects and cost estimation?

IBM Cloud projects and cost estimation helps enterprises significantly reduce time spent managing and monitoring resources. This makes it easier to ensure a secure-by-default environment for critical workloads, maintain continuous compliance across the cloud, and ensure application and infrastructure security and compliance.

Projects are an essential building block for enterprises as they use available tools and products that IBM Cloud has to offer. With IBM Cloud projects, you can securely develop, deploy and manage regulated, mission-critical enterprise workloads in the cloud. To learn more about projects and running secure enterprise workloads, see Learning about IaC deployments with projects.

More about projects

Projects enable teams to configure, deploy and monitor architecture deployments by using DevOps best practices. Each project includes tools to scan for potentially harmful resource changes, compliance, security and cost, while simultaneously tracking configuration versioning and governance. They’re designed with an IaC- and compliance-first approach that helps to ensure that a project is managed, secure and always compliant:

Deployable architectures

By leveraging deployable architectures, customers can create projects with compliant infrastructure architecture on their own. Deployable architectures, which are now available in the catalog, provide automation for the deployment of common architectural patterns that combine one or more cloud resources. Each deployable architecture is built and maintained by IBM Cloud experts following IBM Cloud best practices to take the guesswork out of the architecture design process and reduce the time it takes to deploy to just minutes.

Compliance managers and solution architects can review the components of the architecture and the level of compliance that each deployable architecture meets by reviewing the details directly from the catalog detail pages. Learn more about deployable architectures here.

An important factor when determining if a deployable architecture is going to fulfill your organization’s needs is understanding how much it’s going to cost you. The cost estimation experience built into both the IBM Cloud catalog and projects makes obtaining pricing information for deployable architectures easy.

From the catalog, simply select the deployable architecture you are interested in, and then choose a variation. From here, you will see a breakdown of its price down to the individual resources that the architecture will provision. You will also be able to view this breakdown from the projects workspace when validating your deployment.

Get started with projects and cost estimation

Projects and cost estimation offer a comprehensive and integrated approach to managing related resources and IaC deployments across accounts. With a unified platform that can manage workloads across multiple cloud environments, our solution ensures that critical workloads are secure and compliant by default. Our platform offers continuous monitoring and remediation of security and compliance issues, reducing the burden on IT teams and enabling them to focus on other critical tasks.

Our solution also offers features like automated policy enforcement, user access controls, trusted profiles and real-time security scanning, helping enterprises ensure that their applications and infrastructure are secure and compliant at all times. This means that enterprises can focus on innovation and growth, instead of worrying about security and compliance issues.

Projects are now generally available here. Learn more about the benefits and use cases of projects. If you are interested in learning more about cost estimation, please see estimating architecture costs in a project. Account structure, cross-account networking, resource deployment and billing are all important factors for large enterprises. With so much to manage, enterprises run the risk of governance, scaling, security and accounting issues. For best practices to achieve robust and compliant solutions, please see our guide on Enterprise account architecture.

Don’t miss this opportunity to transform your enterprise. Contact us today to learn more about our innovative solution and how it can benefit your business.