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Schematics
Use Terraform to automate the provisioning and configuration of your IBM Cloud resources., Rapidly build, duplicate, and scale complex, multitier cloud environments from reusable templates. For more information, see Schematics Workspaces.
Use Ansible playbooks to perform day-2 operations on cloud resources, cloud environments, and app workloads. Whether you want to deploy multi-tier application software, start or stop virtual servers, rotate keys, backup and restore app data, or manage database schemas, simply specify the tasks that you want to run in your playbook and let Schematics securely connect and complete the tasks. For more information about managing Schematics Actions and its features, see Schematics Actions.
Define inventories to specify the targets for Ansible operations with Schematics Actions. Dynamically select hosts deployed using Schematics Workspaces, using resource queries to define the targets for application deployment or operations.
Extend Schematics' ability to provision and configure resources and infrastructure to private isolated cloud networks or on-premise infrastructure. Agents are deployed in your isolated or private network enabling Terraform or Ansible automation jobs to run locally to your systems.
Use cases
Speed infrastructure provisioning by automating tasks, and eliminating manual configuration.
Improve consistency by using pre-defined and re-usable Terraform and Ansible modules and configurations.
Accelerate every phase of the software delivery lifecycle, including sandbox provisioning, QA and more.
Reduce cloud costs by provisioning resources, only when you require them — allowing automation to manage the provisioning and deletion of resources on-demand.
Schematics works with IBM Cloud resources so you can have your resources and management in one place for IBM Cloud.
Integration of logging and activity tracking for IaC operations provides insights to health and events for your IBM Cloud resources.
Have your team build, deploy and iterate on your infrastructure automation processes.
Integrate with IBM Cloud IAM, Key Protect, LogDNA, SysDig and more.
Improve the DevOps lifecycle, from planning and builds to software testing and application monitoring.
Deploy IBM Cloud Paks with IBM Cloud Schematics and access solutions for data, automation, AIOps and more.
Employ Satellite and Schematics to automate the creation of Satellite locations and Red Hat OpenShift® on IBM Cloud.
This video explains Infrastructure as Code (IaC), the difference between imperative and declarative approaches, how each impacts your dev environment, and more.
Terraform is an open source tool that enables you to automate and manage your infrastructure, platform and services using a declarative language.
Try an IBM-provided Ansible playbook to perform cloud operations on target hosts or to get started with IBM Cloud® Schematics actions.
Frequently asked questions
Get answers to the most commonly asked questions about this product.
IBM Cloud Schematics provides powerful tools to automate your cloud infrastructure provisioning and management process, the configuration and operation of your cloud resources, and the deployment of your app workloads.
To do so, Schematics leverages open source projects, such as Terraform, Ansible, OpenShift, Operators, and Helm, and delivers these capabilities to you as a managed service. Rather than installing each open source project on your machine, and learning the API or CLI, you declare the tasks that you want to run in IBM Cloud and watch Schematics run these tasks for you.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) helps you codify your cloud environment so that you can automate the provisioning and management of your resources in the cloud. Rather than manually provisioning and configuring infrastructure resources or by using scripts to adjust your cloud environment, you use a high-level scripting language to specify your resource and its configuration. Then, you use tools like Terraform to provision the resource in the cloud by leveraging its API. Your infrastructure code is treated the same way as your app code so that you can apply DevOps core practices such as version control, testing, and continuous monitoring.
IBM Cloud Schematics workspaces are provided to you at no cost. However, when you decide to apply your Terraform template in IBM Cloud by clicking Apply plan from the workspace details page or running the ibmcloud terraform apply command, you are charged for the IBM Cloud resources that are described in your Terraform template. Review available service plans and pricing information for each resource that you are about to create. Some services come with a limit per IBM Cloud account. If you are about to reach the service limit for your account, the resource is not provisioned until you increase the service quota, or remove existing services first.
With IBM Cloud Schematics, you can run Ansible playbooks or Schematics actions against your IBM Cloud by using the Ansible provisioner in your Terraform configuration file. For example, use the Ansible provisioner to deploy software on IBM Cloud resources or perform actions against your resources, such as shutting down a virtual server instance. For more information about how to use the Ansible provisioner, see the following blogs:
Terraform is an open source IaC tool, created by HashiCorp. It is a declarative coding tool that enables developers to use a high-level configuration language called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) to describe the desired“end-state of cloud or on-premises infrastructure for running an application. It then generates a plan for reaching that end-state and executes the plan to provision the infrastructure.
Because Terraform uses a simple syntax, you can provision infrastructure across multiple cloud and on-premises data centers. You can safely and efficiently reprovision infrastructure in response to configuration changes. It is currently one of the most popular infrastructure automation tools available. If your organization plans to deploy a hybrid cloud or multicloud environment, you’ll likely want or need to get to know Terraform.
Yes, IBM Cloud Schematics supports multiple Terraform provider versions. You need to add Terraform provider block with the right provider version. By default the provider executes latest version 1.21.0, and previous four versions such as 1.20.1, 1.20.0, 1.19.0, 1.18.0 are supported.
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intraservice orchestration, and many other IT needs. Since it uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, it's easy to deploy. And most importantly, it uses a simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allows you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.
After new Terraform and Ansible versions are released by the community, the IBM team begins a process of hardening and testing the release for Schematics. Availability of new versions depend on the results of these tests, community updates, security patches, and technology changes between versions. Make sure that your Terraform templates and Ansible playbooks are compatible with one of the supported versions so that you can run them in Schematics.