Overview of the cloudkit

The cloudkit provides automation of installation, deployment, and configuration of IBM Storage Scale on the public cloud. For a list of features available in the cloudkit, see Table 1.

When using the cloudkit, provide environmental information based on which the cloudkit dynamically provisions all the required resources on the public cloud. Thereafter, the cloudkit installs, configures, and deploys the specified configuration.

The cloudkit enables the following tasks:
  • Dynamically provision required resources, install, configure, and deploy IBM Storage Scale into either a newly created Virtual Private Cloud environment or an existing one.
  • Allow the creation of Virtual Machine Images that can be used to rapidly deploy IBM Storage Scale on public cloud.
  • Ability to create storage only, compute only and combined clusters (compute and storage cluster).
  • Perform a remote mount of a filesystem from one IBM Storage Scale storage cluster to one or multiple compute clusters.
  • Performs storage cluster prerequisites needed by IBM Storage Scale Container Native Access.
  • Revoke a previously remote mounted filesystem.
  • Destroy a previously deployed IBM Storage Scale cluster.

Installation and configuration are driven through commands that can be run either interactively or by using command line options.

The cloudkit is available in IBM Storage Scale Data Management, Data Access, and Developer self extraction packages.

From the self-extracting package, the cloudkit is extracted to this directory, by default:
/usr/lpp/mmfs/package_code_version/cloudkit

The IBM Storage Scale cloudkit can be invoked through the cloudkit command in this directory, and this directory can optionally be added to the path.

The cloudkit operation consists of three main layers, the command layer, infrastructure provisioning layer, and Scale ansible configuration layer.

  • The command layer is the front-end interface for cloudkit users. This layer provides a Command Line Interface (CLI) that allows users to deploy and manage applications with ease. The CLI provides a simple interactive query and filters syntax for user input. The command layer is designed to be user friendly and intuitive, making it easy for users to get started with cloudkit.

  • The infrastructure provisioning layer is responsible for creating and managing the underlying cloud infrastructure needed to support the IBM Storage Scale need. This layer includes terraform templates for creating and managing virtual machines, storage resources, security rules, and networking components.

  • The Ansible configuration layer is responsible for configuring IBM Storage Scale by installing the required RPMS and building the cluster on the cloud infrastructure.