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Getting started

This guide walks through connecting an AWS account, registering your first service, and seeing your cloud resources in the catalog. It takes about 20 minutes.

Prerequisites

  • A Sciple workspace. Request one at the contact page.
  • An AWS account where you can create IAM keys or roles.
  • An OIDC identity provider if you want to wire up SSO. Local accounts also work.

Step 1. Sign in and create a group

Sign in to your workspace. The first user is the workspace administrator. Create a group with the permissions your engineers need. A reasonable starting point is to give engineers permission to view services, manage services, view cloud resources, view Kubernetes, and view credentials, with secret values withheld unless they specifically need them.

Step 2. Register an AWS account

Open the Cloud area in the dashboard, choose Accounts, and add an AWS account. You can use static IAM keys to get started quickly, or a cross-account role with an external ID for the way you would run this in production. Sciple uses scoped, short-lived credentials in both cases. There is nothing for you to install in your AWS account beyond the role or keys.

The role only needs read access for the resource families you want Sciple to surface. Start narrow. You can broaden permissions later as you adopt more capabilities.

Step 3. Sync your cloud

Pick a region and trigger a sync. Sciple discovers and caches AWS resources across every connected service family. The first sync takes a few minutes; subsequent syncs are incremental. Sync jobs are tracked in the dashboard so you can see when each family last refreshed.

Once the sync finishes, head to Cloud and pick any family. You will see your resources in a searchable table. Column visibility and column ordering remember themselves per user.

Step 4. Register your first service

Open Services and create a new service. Pick the SCM provider. The repository list is fetched live and will auto-fill the URL, default branch, and description. Set the kind, the runtime, the tier, the owner group, the environment memberships, and the links to docs, runbook, and on-call.

Once the service is created, every other module in the platform recognises it. The cloud browser surfaces related resources. The configuration system attaches values to it. The CI/CD wrapper uses it as the owner for any pipeline you wire up.

Step 5. Wire up a pipeline

Open the service, go to the CI/CD area, and define a pipeline from one of the platform’s templated configurations. Pipelines are owned by a service-and-environment pair. Templated tasks make promoting a build from staging to production a configuration change instead of a copy-paste. Sciple provisions the CodeBuild project in the AWS account you connected and runs the build there.

What is next