Introduction¶
edgeContinuum lets your teams deploy and run virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, PostgreSQL databases and applications on your own cloud platforms, from one console, with shared access control and quotas. This page explains the core concepts and the path from a new account to running workloads.
How the platform is organized¶
- Organizations and projects: an organization is your tenant. It holds your members, roles, quotas and infrastructure. Projects inside it hold the resources you deploy.
- Users, groups and permissions: who belongs to your organization and what they can do, granted as roles or individual permissions, to members directly or through groups.
- Infrastructure: the cloud platforms (today, OpenStack) your organization connects so edgeContinuum can deploy onto them.
- Resource quotas: how many of each resource your organization can hold.
Key terms¶
- Platform operator
- The team that runs the edgeContinuum platform you sign in to. They decide platform-wide settings such as quota profiles, how many organizations each account may own, and which optional features are enabled. If something on these pages depends on a setting you can't see, ask your platform operator.
- Organization administrator
- A member of your organization who holds its OrganizationAdmin role and can do everything in it. See Owner and administrators.
- Region and zone
- Labels for where your infrastructure is. A region (for example eu-west) contains zones, and each infrastructure is registered in one zone. When you create a resource you pick the region, zone and infrastructure it runs on.
- Infrastructure
- One cloud account (today, an OpenStack project) registered with the platform, with the sizes and images your teams may use.
- Service config
- A configuration on an infrastructure that sets up and offers managed services, such as Kubernetes clusters and PostgreSQL databases, to your users. Without one, those services can't be created on that infrastructure. See Infrastructure.
Resource statuses¶
Virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, PostgreSQL instances, networks, routers, firewalls and SSH keys all report a status:
| Status | Meaning | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Running as expected. | Everything your permissions allow. |
| Degraded | The last change failed, but the resource still exists and runs. | Keep making changes, run Sync to re-apply its configuration, or delete it. |
| Error | Creating it failed, or it stopped working. Its Action History says why. | Delete it, or detach it (Kubernetes clusters and PostgreSQL instances: delete only). It still counts against your quota until you do. |
| In progress (Pending, Creating, Updating, Scaling, Upgrading, Deleting) | An operation is running. | Wait for it to finish. Nothing else can start meanwhile; where supported, you can cancel it from the resource's Action History. |
Day-2 changes (editing, resizing, power, monitoring, networks, rules, routes, sync) work while a resource is Active or Degraded. Unknown means the platform hasn't reported the resource's state yet. The console offers only what is possible in the current status and shows why a control is disabled. Applications have their own statuses.
Confirm a delete or detach¶
To confirm a delete or detach, you type the resource's name, or, for a resource without a name, the last 8 characters of its ID. Deleting can't be undone.
Find your way around the console¶
The sidebar groups the console into sections:
| Section | What you do there |
|---|---|
| OVERVIEW | The Dashboard: service health, quick actions and counts of your applications, infrastructure and members. |
| APPLICATIONS | Register clusters, group them into fleets, and deploy applications from the Marketplace. |
| INFRASTRUCTURE | Manage regions, zones and the infrastructures your services run on. |
| MANAGED SERVICES | Create Kubernetes clusters and PostgreSQL databases. |
| COMPUTE & NETWORK | Create virtual machines, and the networks, routers, firewalls and SSH keys they use. |
| IAM & SECURITY | Manage organizations, projects, members, groups and roles in Organizations & projects, and check your quota usage. |
The header shows where you are working: the active Organization, and on resource lists a Project filter. Lists, dashboards and new resources follow the organization you pick. See Working in an organization and project.
From sign-up to running services¶
- Create your account: register, verify your email address with the link the platform sends you, and sign in. If your platform operator activates accounts manually, you can sign in only once yours is activated. Turning on two-factor authentication is recommended.
- Find your organization: by default you start with an organization named after you that already contains a project, so you can start right away. If someone invited you to their organization instead, accept the invitation under IAM & SECURITY > Organizations & projects, in My invitations; an organization administrator then has to give you access.
- Set up your organization: create more projects if you need them, invite members and give them access with roles, preferably through groups. How many projects, members and groups you can add depends on your quotas.
- Connect your infrastructure: under INFRASTRUCTURE, create a region and a zone, register your cloud (see OpenStack Setup), choose the sizes and images teams may use, and add a service config to offer Kubernetes clusters and PostgreSQL databases. If your platform operator provides the infrastructure for you, these pages are read-only and you can skip this step. Applications can also run on a Kubernetes cluster you register yourself under APPLICATIONS.
- Set up networking: create, or import from your cloud, the networks, routers, firewalls and SSH keys your workloads need. Networks, firewalls and SSH keys can be shared with other projects.
- Deploy services: launch virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, PostgreSQL databases and applications.
Resources marked Imported in a list's Origin column already existed in your cloud and were brought into edgeContinuum rather than created through it. See Imported Resources.