Rational Asset Manager and the cloud

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You can govern asset collaboration and reuse by using IBM® Rational® Asset Manager on the cloud or by using IBM Rational Asset Manager capabilities in a cloud environment.

You can use IBM Rational Asset Manager and the cloud in the following ways:

Rational Asset Manager on the cloud:
If you set up the product on the cloud, you can control which communities can work with which assets.
Rational Asset Manager in a cloud:
You can manage security and support multiple user groups or tenants on a cloud by defining communities and mapping communities to tenants.
Rational Asset Manager capabilities for the cloud:
If you have a cloud environment, you can use capabilities from IBM Rational Asset Manager as part of a deployment planning and automation solution, to enable the development lifecycle and make deliverables available for the cloud environment. By implementing a portal from the cloud, you can govern access to assets. You can ensure that only the definitive, approved versions of services and images are reused, and you can prevent teams from creating duplicate assets. To learn more about planning, automating, and governing application deployments in the cloud, see Deployment Planning and Automation.

Rational Asset Manager on the cloud

Draft comment:
LJW: The content in the first part of this section was originally in a list that was at the beginning of this topic and in the "Using Rational Asset Manager on the cloud" section.

When you use IBM Rational Asset Manager on the cloud, you can set up an instance so that only users in certain communities can work on assets. Using an instance of IBM Rational Asset Manager on the cloud is like using the web client. Users log in, and depending on their permissions, they can search, download, collaborate on, modify, and create assets. For more information about working with the web client, see Collaborating on assets with the IBM Rational Asset Manager web client. To create an instance of Rational Asset Manager on the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, see Setting up Rational Asset Manager on the cloud.

Rational Asset Manager in a cloud

You can use Rational Asset Manager in a cloud environment to manage multiple tenants by defining communities.

A tenant is a team, organization, or other group of users that works on a specific project or requires a specific level of access to a system. By defining communities for each tenant, you can isolate assets from or share assets with users. Asset communities are collections of assets that are grouped by a common use and purpose. In a community, users interact with related assets. Community administrators assign roles and permissions to users and user groups to set different levels of access to the community. For example, by defining communities, community administrators can determine which users can access assets:

For every tenant, administrators can create an asset community in which the tenant administrator is the community administrator. This asset community can be set as private so that it is visible only within the tenant boundary.
All of the registered users of the tenant become registered members of the asset community and can publish and download assets.
When users publish assets, they publish to the community by default.
Optionally, each community administrator can set up additional roles for users. For example, administrators might set up roles to support an asset review or governance process.

You can specify and manage relationships between communities while controlling visibility for security purposes. You can create communities to manage these types of access and asset types:

Public access: Access to assets that are approved for public use.
Enterprise access: Access to specific communities for each group of tenants.
Documentation: A public community for informational assets that can also be used for self-service, customizable help.

For information about isolating and sharing assets in a multi-tenant environment and using public communities to connect users of private communities, see Best practices for cloud-based asset-centric collaboration. For more information about using the cloud as a platform, see IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud and IBM Rational Asset Manager on the cloud.

Rational Asset Manager capabilities for the cloud

Draft comment:
LJW: The first part of this section was originally near the beginning of the topic

In addition to creating instances of the product on the cloud and setting up instances for users, you can set up a system that uses IBM Rational Asset Manager capabilities to be the platform for managing cloud services and images. You can configure an instance of Rational Asset Manager on a cloud to be a portal for asset types such as virtual machine images, deployment topology models, and software bundles.

If you use IBM Rational Asset Manager to define asset types for your deliverables, you can govern the lifecycle management for those deliverables. You can also save images of cloud instances as assets and make the images available for other projects and future phases of projects. For example, you can make virtual machine images or software services available as assets and automate the deployment of those images or services.

You catalog services and virtual images as assets. Then, instead of instantiating or duplicating instances of similar services and images, you can use the assets to serve as cloud instances. For more information, see Rational Asset Manager as a portal to assets on the cloud.

Draft comment:
LJW: Consider consolodating the text from the next two lists. Also, I’m not convinced that some of the items in the second list are useful to mention in a help topic. At this point in the topic, the benefits of using Rational Asset Manager on the cloud should already be clear. A list of additional benefits at the end seems superfluous.

You might use IBM Rational Asset Manager capabilities in a cloud environment for the following purposes:

Managing image development through asset lifecycles: IBM Rational Asset Manager can be a lifecycle engine to manage a system. For example, before an image is available in a public community, you can create a copy in a testing or staging community that inherits the asset lifecycle.
Making software bundles available: IBM Rational Asset Manager can be an asset catalog for software bundles. A bundle is an asset type in the repository for a virtual image. You can create copies for rapid deployment of virtual machine images and development environments. For example, the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise uses IBM Rational Asset Manager to retrieve libraries when you select an image and bundles.
Provisioning a cloud instance and configuring it: You can provision a configured instance of IBM Rational Asset Manager and other tools. These tools can be copied and then configured, deployed, and used by a team in a community. The same instance can be used for different development and test environments. You can list the points of variability for consumers of the instance so that they can configure it for their specific project.

In addition, using IBM Rational Asset Manager for the cloud provides the following benefits:

With images as assets, you can quickly and simply provision new images from assets.
Instead of maintaining written reports to summarize installation and deployment steps, you can use deployment topology models by using IBM Rational Software Architect.
You can accomplish automated, repeatable, and reusable processes with topologies by using IBM Rational Build Forge projects.
Instead of maintaining configuration files in various locations, you can use lifecycle management in IBM Rational Asset Manager and the version control for source files in IBM Rational Team Concert™ to reuse assets.
You can use IBM Rational Asset Manager as the definitive software library to drive and govern changes beyond assets. You can manage a whole system that comprises integrated tools, processes, and deliverables, such as virtual machine images.

For more information about configuring IBM Rational Asset Manager on the cloud to manage security for different levels and types of asset access, see Best practices for asset-centric collaboration.