Managing an Amazon Web Services external provider

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management supports the external cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS).

You can integrate BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management with AWS so that BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management can fulfill end user requests for automated provisioning of virtual machines to an Amazon Availability Zone (AZ) or Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

This topic provides an overview of implementing the AWS provider, including a high-level implementation walk-through.

Before you begin

To enable software deployment, BMC Server Automation must be registered as a provider.
You must have an AWS account and should be familiar with the AWS environment.
Obtain security credentials for the AWS account. This is necessary because the AWS account must be able to make Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) API requests. To generate and extract the certificate and private key files for the AWS account, see Amazon Web Services documentation.
Review an overview of the AWS support in BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management.

High-level tasks for setting up Amazon Web Services as an external provider

There are two ways you can set up an AWS external provider: you can perform the tasks manually or you can use Quick Start to perform the configuration.

Manually setting up the AWS environment

The following table lists the main stages that are required to initiate an Amazon Web Services instance and the tasks associated with the stages. The topics listed in the table provide information and instructions for manually setting up, preparing, and initiating an Amazon Web Services service offering instance.

Process stage	Procedures
Configuring-the-infrastructure-for-Amazon-Web-Services-support	Typically you perform the activities of the setup phase of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) integration only once. These activities include configuring the AWS provider and setting up credentials. Configuring-the-Amazon-Web-Services-provider-type Configuring-user-credentials-for-Amazon-Web-Services-workloads
Creating or onboarding AWS resources	You have the option to onboard existing existing AWS resources or create them: You can bring existing AWS resources, such as Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and Availability Zones into BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management by onboarding them as logical data centers. You can also create new AWS resources by creating a network blueprint and then building a logical data center for the blueprint. The logical data center that you create can represent a VPC or an availability zone. The following topics describe the process for creating a network blueprint and a logical data center, in the context of AWS: Creating-and-managing-network-blueprints Creating-a-Logical-Data-Center-for-Amazon-Web-Services
Configuring-and-managing-resources-for-Amazon-Web-Services	During resource configuration, you create and configure the components that are needed to provision an Amazon Web Services (AWS) instance. Mapping tenants to a Logical Data Center Creating-product-catalog-entries-for-Amazon-Web-Services Building-service-blueprints-for-Amazon-Web-Services Managing-resources-for-Amazon-Web-Services
Managing service offerings	In this final phase, you prepare and initiate the service offering request, as described in the following topics: Defining-Service-Catalog-entries-for-Amazon-Web-Services Creating-the-service-offering-for-Amazon-Web-Services Submitting-the-requestable-offering-for-Amazon-Web-Services

Using Quick Start to perform the configuration

Quick Start asks you to provide a limited number of configuration settings for BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management so it can integrate with AWS. To use Quick Start for the configuration, see Provisioning-VMs-on-Amazon-using-Quick-Start.

Where to go from here

To start your Amazon Web Services implementation, see Configuring-the-infrastructure-for-Amazon-Web-Services-support.