The watsonx platform architecture

The watsonx experience is part of the IBM watsonx platform. The IBM watsonx platform has multiple integrated experiences that share services and workspaces. The experiences that you can access depend on which watsonx services are provisioned in your cloud provider account. An experience provides focused access to the tools for specific tasks.

The IBM watsonx platform is available on IBM Cloud and AWS. However, not all experiences are currently provided on AWS.

The IBM watsonx platform includes these integrated experiences:

  • watsonx, which contains the watsonx.ai Studio, watsonx.ai Runtime, and watsonx.governance services for building and governing AI solutions.
  • Data Fabric, which contains the watsonx.data intelligence and watsonx.data integration services for transforming and sharing high-quality, trusted data products.
  • watsonx.data as a Service, which contains the watsonx.data, watsonx.ai Studio, watsonx.ai Runtime, watsonx.data intelligence, and watsonx.data integration services for transforming unstructured data for AI.

Projects are shared between the experiences so that users with different tasks can work together. You can switch between experiences to work with different tools. Users who are collaborating in the same project can work in different experiences. For example, suppose a data engineer and an AI engineer are collaborators in the same project. The data engineer ingests data sources into the lakehouse in the watsonx.data experience and integrates the data in the Data Fabric experience to prepare a data asset. The AI engineer, who is working in the watsonx experience, uses the data asset to train a model. See Switching between experiences.

The following illustration shows the architecture of the integrated experiences on the IBM Cloud platform, the services and capabilities for each experience, and the shared functionality. The architecture is similar on the AWS platform, except that the watsonx.data as a Service is not available.

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The Cloud Pak for Data as a Service experience contains many of the same services as the other experiences but without generative AI or unstructured data processing capabilities. Projects are not shared, but you can switch a project from Cloud Pak for Data as a Service to the watsonx experience or the Data Fabric experience.

Shared functionality

The platform includes the following functionality that is shared between services and experiences for secure and scalable collaboration:

  • Connectivity
  • Administration
  • Storage
  • Workspaces
  • Resource hub

Connectivity

You can create connections to remote data sources and import connected data. You can configure connections with personal or shared credentials. For a list of supported connectors, see Connectors.

You can share connections with others across the platform in the Platform assets catalog.

Administration

The following administration features provide security and flexibility:

Software and hardware
The watsonx platform is fully managed by your cloud provider. Software updates are automatic. Scaling of usage resources and storage is automatic.

Security, compliance, and isolation

The data security, network security, security standards compliance, and isolation of watsonx are managed by your cloud provider. Data is encrypted at rest and in motion. You can set up extra security and encryption options.

Your work on the platform, including your data and other assets that you create, are private to your account. Your data and assets are never accessible or used by IBM or any other person or organization.

Learn more about security and your options:


Services provisioning

You can add services from the Services catalog. See Creating and managing IBM Cloud services.

You must access some services in other experiences. For example, if you add the watsonx.data intelligence service, you must switch to the Data Fabric experience to use it.

You can add data source services and create connections to them from the IBM watsonx experiences, but you manage data source services from the IBM Cloud console.


User management

You add users and user groups and manage their IBM Cloud account roles and permissions with IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management. You assign roles within each collaborative workspace across the platform. See Managing users and access.

For users on AWS, you can manage user accounts through the IBM SaaS Console. For more information, see Managing access to the console.

Storage on IBM Cloud

When you sign up for an experience on the platform, an IBM Cloud Object Storage service instance is automatically provisioned to provide storage for the assets that you create or add to workspaces. The IBM Cloud Object Storage service instance is shared across experiences. Information that is stored in IBM Cloud Object Storage is encrypted and resilient. Each workspace has its own dedicated bucket. See Object storage for workspaces on IBM Cloud.

Storage on AWS

For watsonx on AWS, data is stored in Amazon S3 storage. To access S3 storage, you must delegate access to establish trust between your AWS account and your IBM AWS account. See Delegate access by establishing trust between your AWS account and IBM AWS account.

Workspaces

The platform is organized as a set of collaborative workspaces where you can work with your team or organization. Each workspace has a set of members with roles that provide permissions to perform actions.

Most users work with assets, which are items that are created or added to workspaces by users. Assets can represent data, flows, experiments, or other types of code or information. See Asset types and properties.

You can work in these types of platform workspaces in the watsonx experience:

  • Projects
  • Deployment spaces
  • Platform assets catalog

You can search for assets across all workspaces that you belong to.

Projects

Projects are where your data science and model builder teams work with data to create assets, such as, saved prompts, notebooks, models, or pipelines. Your first project, which is known as your sandbox project, is created automatically when you sign up for watsonx.ai. See Your sandbox project.

Your projects are shared across the integrated experiences. However, you can view and run only those assets that are valid in the current experience. For example, in the watsonx experience, you can't enrich the metadata of a data asset.

The following image shows what the Overview page of a project might look like.

Overview page for a project

Deployment spaces

Deployment spaces are where your ModelOps team deploys models and other deployable assets to production and then tests and manages deployments in production. After you build models and deployable assets in projects, you promote them to deployment spaces. See Deployment spaces.

Deployment spaces are available only in the watsonx.

The following image shows what the Overview page of a deployment space might look like.

Overview page for a deployment space

Platform assets catalog

The Platform assets catalog stores assets and other items in specialized views:

  • The Platform connections view stores connection assets. You can access platform connections in any project or deployment space.
  • AI use cases track the details for AI assets in factsheets.
  • The Guardrail manager stores guardrail policies.
  • The Governed agentic catalog stores AI-powered agents and tools.

The Platform assets catalog is shared across integrated experiences. However, in each experience you can view and access only those assets, items, or views that are applicable to that experience.

The following image shows what the Connections page of the Platform connections might look like.

Connections page for Platform connections

Resource hub

The Resource hub is an integrated collection of samples that provides deployed foundation models, data assets, prompts, notebooks, and sample projects. Sample notebooks provide examples of data science and machine learning code. Sample projects contain sets of data, models, other assets, and detailed instructions on how to solve a particular business problem.

The following image shows what Resource hub looks like.

Samples page

Watch this video to see a tour of the Resource hub.

This video provides a visual method to learn the concepts and tasks in this documentation.