Customized deployable architecture

Tutorials

This repository contains tutorials that step through the concept of a deployable architecture, how to develop one, how to customize an existing one found in the IBM catalog, and more. The tutorials are a work in progress and are continually being improved upon. Tutorials so far include:

• deployable architecture overview
• basic depployable architecture customization
• developing an extension for a deployable architecture

Example customized deployable architectures

This repository contains two example deployable architectures.

The first is an example of a customization of the IBM deployable architecture VSI on VPC landing zone. This customization is a minor customization but illustrates how easy it is accomoplish making a change that is suited to a particular need. The customized deployable architecture still deploys a base networking layer with a Virtual Private Cloud but is now limited to the 'us-east' IBM Cloud region.

The second is an example of a deployable architecture that extends the base deployment by deploying a workload. The workload is a virtual server that is deployed within the VPC created by the base and it runs an Apache web server. There are two implementations of this deployable architecture, an 'extension' and a 'fullstack'. A deployable architecture that is an 'extension' requires that another offering be deployed prior to its own deployment. It has a dependency. A deployable architecture that is a 'fullstack' does not have any dependencies and will deploy the entire solution. The deployable architecture provisions a virtual server within the environment created by the customized VSI on VPC landing zone. Ansible playbooks and the IBM Projects service are used to perform the actual application install of Apache. See README for more details.

Also provided are examples of automation that perform the tasks to onboard, validate and publish to an IBM Cloud catalog. One example is implemented as a script that executes as part of a Github action which triggers on the creation of a release, the other is implemented as an IBM Cloud toolchain.

The customization process

This example shows how:

1. Create a custom deployable architecture and deploy it as a custom tile to the IBM cloud catalog.
2. Create a custom extension that extends the custom deployable architecture (based on the IBM VSI module) to deploy an Apache server.
3. create a pipeline that will publish the custom architecture and apache server as private solutions on the IBM public catalog.

Catalog tiles:

• custom-deployable-arch is a generic deployable architecture for the network landscape.
• custom-apache is a deployable architecture as a workload which runs a secure apache server.

The Apache workload tile has both an extension and a fullstack implemenation as variations of the deployable architecture.