patterns.md

copyright	lastupdated
years 2015, 2018	2018-04-13

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Structural overview

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For a successful project, take time to plan and design which resources you need and what your enterprise requirements are. To help you get started, consider the following questions: {:shortdesc}

• How many, and what type of, apps are you developing?
• Which services do the apps need to access?
• Who collaborates in the development process and what role do they play?
• What degree of isolation is required for each phase of the project?
• Does your enterprise supply the infrastructure resources?
• How does your company communicate?
• Is there a naming standard that you can implement to clearly identify the organization and space usage?

As part of deciding which type of cloud environment you need, plan the structure of your account, organizations, spaces, resources, and team members.

For most companies, a single {{site.data.keyword.Bluemix_notm}} account is sufficient. For larger companies where there is more than one business area, you might want a separate {{site.data.keyword.Bluemix_notm}} account for each business domain. For example, within a large banking corporation, there can be separate accounts for the retail and commercial sectors.

The following table provides a summary of some of the key elements.

Element	Description
	Contains one or more organizations. You must have a Pay-As-You-Go account to create more than one organization.
	Can own only one account.
	Can add one or more organization managers to delegate the org management, which includes the read and write permissions to the organizations.
	Can be a team member in organizations and spaces in other {{site.data.keyword.Bluemix_notm}} accounts.
Organization	Contains one or more spaces.
	Contains one or more org managers.
	Contains one or more team members. Each team member can be granted one or more roles.
	The usage charges, which are generated by a deployed application within a space, are reported at the organization level.
Space	Contains one or more resources.
	Contains one or more apps.
	Contains one or more space managers.
	Contains one or more team members. Each user must already be a team member in the owning organization. Each team member can be granted one or more roles.
Team member	Can be added to one or more organizations and spaces across different accounts.
	Can be given more than one role within the same organization, space, or both.
{:caption="Table 1. Description of key elements" caption-side="top"}