Overview of the cloudkit

The cloudkit is a command line interface that provides automation of deployment, upgrade, and configuration of IBM Storage Scale on public clouds.

For a list of features available in the cloudkit, see Table 1. Cloudkit uses the underlying configured cloud account, and dynamically fetches the information that is required for provisioning IBM Storage Scale 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, network, DNS, and jump host 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.
  • Enabling IBM Storage Scale active file management (AFM) to cloud object storage on AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure.
  • Destroy a previously deployed IBM Storage Scale cluster.
  • Start of changeAbility to scale-out IBM Storage Scale cluster.End of change
  • Start of changeAbility to upgrade IBM Storage Scale cluster on AWS, GCP, or Microsoft Azure.End of change

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

Cloudkit offers a flexible, composable deployment architecture:
  • Allows administrators to pick and choose the resource creation through cloudkit; or to use already created infrastructure resources.
  • Offers flexibility in terms of components like network, DNS, network access methods, disk types, instance types.
  • Administrators can use cloudkit also to create isolated resources required for IBM Storage Scale workload end-to-end, instead of reusing resources from existing infrastructure.
The cloudkit operation consists of three main layers, the command layer, infrastructure provisioning layer, and IBM Storage 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.