After establishing a cloud provider account, you must also establish a cloud account in ALM. When defining a cloud account in ALM, you enter your cloud provider credentials, associate projects to the account, and define the total number of cloud credits allowed for consumption by your provisioned hosts.
Cloud accounts can be added from Lab Management or from ALM projects. Accounts added from Lab Management are public and can be accessed by any project they are linked to. Accounts added from ALM projects are private and can be accessed only from the projects where they were created.
Note: You must have an existing Microsoft Azure or Amazon EC2 account in order to add an account in ALM.
Cloud Credits
When setting up cloud accounts in ALM, to ensure efficiency and reduce cost, you can regulate cloud provisioning usage by assigning virtual cloud credits to your projects. For each project, you can define the total number of cloud credits allowed for consumption by your provisioned hosts. Note that credits used and consumed are not representative of the actual cost to your cloud provider.
Note:
- After a host is provisioned, it consumes credits from the project that provisioned it.
- Credits are consumed for each host on an hourly basis, and the number of credits consumed per hour is specified in the host template.
- Hosts can only be provisioned if sufficient credits are available. When the total amount of credits drops to zero, you will not be able to provision new hosts. Already provisioned host will continue to consume credits.
For details on creating and managing cloud accounts in ALM, see How to Manage Cloud Accounts.
