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Portal

What is the Switch Cloud Portal (SCP)?

The Portal is the centralised fulfilment and orchestration platform for all Switch Cloud services. It serves as the primary entry point for users, providing a unified interface to manage cloud resources, Projects, Service Instances, and Members across an Organisation.

The following standard services are available in self-service via the Portal:

  • Switch Cloud Compute (SCC): A resilient OpenStack-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform for provisioning and managing virtual machines, block storage and networking.
  • Switch Cloud S3 (SCS3): A Ceph-based, S3-compatible object storage service designed to store and manage large volumes of unstructured data.
  • Switch Cloud Kubernetes (SCK): A managed Kubernetes service built on the Kubermatic Kubernetes Platform (KKP), providing consistent orchestration for containerised applications.

Features and Benefits

  • Unified Interface: Access and manage the Compute, Kubernetes, and S3 services from a single centralised platform.
  • Collaboration: Invite and manage Members to collaborate at Organisation or Project level.
  • Audit Logs: Track actions across the Organisation to support transparency, compliance, and troubleshooting.
  • Scalable Services: Activate, configure, and operate services according to your organisation's operational requirements.

Terminology and Structure

The Portal uses a defined set of concepts to organise and manage all cloud resources. These terms describe how access is controlled, how workloads are separated, and how services are activated. Knowing about this structure will help in configuring settings, managing permissions, and operating services correctly.

Organisation

An Organisation represents a customer's institution or company and serves as the tenant within the Portal. It is the highest-level entity, and all resources – Projects, Members, and Service Instances – are associated with it.

An Organisation defines the contractual context for using Switch Cloud: pricing, billing addresses, references, designated contacts (administrative, billing, and support), and ownership.

Project

A Project is a logical container within an Organisation, used to segment specific workloads or applications. Multiple Projects can be created within an Organisation to isolate and manage different initiatives, typically aligning each with a distinct application or subject area. Depending on the workload and operational requirements, services such as Compute, Kubernetes, and S3 can be activated and managed independently.

Members

Members are users who have access to your Organisation and Projects. Users can be granted membership directly on Projects or inherit access through an Organisation membership.

A user's membership scope is determined by the invitation they receive:

  • Organisation Membership: User is assigned a role on the Organisation, which is implicitely inherited by all Projects.
  • Project Membership: User is assigned a role for a specific Project only.

Note

Currently only an Owner role is supported in both the Organisation and Project scopes. A richer role-based access control system with additional roles is in development.

Roles

Owner

The Owner role grants full administrative access within the scope of the membership:

  • Organisation Scope: The user can create and manage Projects, invite other users as Members at the Organisation or Project scope, and manage all resources and settings.
  • Project Scope: The user can manage Project resources and settings, and invite other users as Members to the Project.

Contact Us

If you have questions that are not covered in this documentation, our support team is here to help. You can reach us at: cloud-support@switch.ch.