Cloud Accounts

What Is a Cloud Account?

A cloud account is ACTIVATE's unified concept for connecting to and managing infrastructure on a cloud service provider (CSP). Each cloud account represents a set of credentials and configuration that links your CSP environment to ACTIVATE, allowing you to provision networks, manage billing, control access, and run compute workloads — all from a single interface.

Cloud accounts are managed at the organization level. Once a cloud account is added, it becomes available for network provisioning, billing configuration, and access sharing with groups within your organization.

Supported Cloud Service Providers

ACTIVATE supports the following cloud service providers:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) — authenticated via access keys
• Microsoft Azure — authenticated via service principal client secrets
• Google Cloud — authenticated via service account keys
• OpenStack — authenticated via application credentials

Cloud Account Lifecycle

Setting up a cloud account follows these general steps:

1. Prepare your CSP — Configure the necessary roles, permissions, and credentials in your cloud provider. See the CSP-specific preparation guides in Managing Cloud Accounts for details.
2. Add the cloud account — Register the cloud account in ACTIVATE by providing your CSP credentials. ACTIVATE will verify that the credentials have sufficient permissions.
3. Create networks — Provision the networking infrastructure (VPCs, subnets, route tables, etc.) that clusters will be deployed on. See Networks for details.
4. Provision billing — Set up billing infrastructure so that ACTIVATE can track and report on cloud spend. See Billing for details.
5. Configure access — Share the cloud account with specific groups in your organization. See Access Control for details.

GovCloud and Assured Workloads

ACTIVATE supports government-specific cloud environments for the following providers:

• AWS GovCloud — isolated AWS regions designed to host sensitive data and regulated workloads
• Azure Government — Microsoft's cloud environment for US government agencies and their partners
• Google Assured Workloads — compliance-focused workload configurations for regulated industries

When adding a cloud account for one of these providers, you can enable the GovCloud option to ensure ACTIVATE provisions resources in the appropriate government regions.

Naming Convention

Cloud account names must use lowercase letters and numbers only. Special characters, spaces, and uppercase letters are not permitted. Choose a descriptive name that identifies the CSP and purpose of the account, as the name cannot be changed after creation.