Resource profiles are cloud provider-agnostic definitions that specify the allowed attribute values for a resource. Resource profiles enable you to control the choices that the user sees when requesting a cloud resource. As a result, you do not need to define a unique blueprint for each variation of the resource.

Note: In addition to the cloud-agnostic profiles, you can add provider public images to the Cloud Provisioning and Governance catalog. See Add an AWS public image to Cloud Provisioning and Governance and Add an Azure public image to Cloud Provisioning and Governance.

Example: Compute profile

You might create a compute profile named Micro and map it to a "micro" hardware type, with specified values for memory and CPU. Later, when a user selects a compute resource while requesting a virtual server, Micro appears as an option in the list of available compute resources. The user does not need to specify values for memory and CPU — the values come from the profile.
Figure 1. Compute profile on the request form
Compute profile on the request form

Resource Profile mappings

Resource profiles create mapping associations between the following items:
  • A cloud account.
  • A logical datacenter in the cloud account.
  • A specific resource type in the CMDB that provides the attributes.
  • Optional: A pricing value that appears to users when they request a resource that uses the resource profile.

By default for AWS and Azure, Cloud Provisioning and Governance maps profiles to templates after Discovery runs. For other providers, such as Google cloud, you must manually associate the profile with the correct template and datacenter.

Resource types

Each resource profile has associated attributes. The attributes depend on the resource types that are populated after you run Discovery on a cloud account.