Think 2019 — Part 2

Here is the continuation of my summary of Think 2019, the main IBM conference in 2019. In Part One, I write about IBM AI and Data products, and here I go into details about Cloud.

Cloud

Everbody knows that AWS dominates in the cloud industry. Many serious players like HP, VMWare, Cisco and others have already left the market. There are still companies that are growing like Microsoft and Alibaba (with Aliyun about which I wrote already back in 2014). IBM is present in this market since the acquisition of Softlayer in 2013, with IaaS, PaaS and SaaS offerings. As I have already mentioned, Ginni Rometty stated that IBM is orienting itself towards the future where hybrid and multi-cloud will play even bigger role than it was the case until now. So, what are the main takeaways of Think 2019 regarding Cloud ?

First, I would highlight the joint keynote speech with Jum Whitehurst, CEO of RedHat. Several months ago, IBM and Red Hat have agreed the integration where IBM is buying Red Hat for $34B. Red Hat is bringing to IBM its portfolio of open source and cloud enabling tools and projects like RHEL, JBoss, Ansible, OpenShift, and many others. RedHat has very strong culture of open source development (which is not strange to IBM), and a large community of almost 8 million developers. IBM counts to be able to scale Red Hat business to a new level and provide this developer community the access to its deep industry expertise and large client base.

Next, showcasing IBM Cloud Private (ICP), which is based on Kubernetes. ICP aims to bring the cloud discussion on a new level, a layer above traditional VMs and a step in the future towards application microservices. ICP runs on top of ESX, bare metal machines, Power, mainframe, OpenShift and is as of now multicloud ready. ICP is the tool that will allow IBM and Red Hat to perform on-premise decomposition of customers’ legacy applications into containers, so that IBM clients can first manage their applications in cloud-like manner, and then eventually extend them into public cloud. This now becomes possible with the help of Red Hat and their developers communities.

Further, IBM Multicloud Manager. Multicloud Manager will help to manage Kubernetes contaners over multiple cloud providers in a consistent way. When you think about multicloud management, and most organizations even now use several (on average 5 different cloud providers), several issues become very important and difficult to manage:

• data transfer
• connectivity
• consistent management of these disparate environment.

Multicloud Manager helps to bridge these gaps and unify the whole environment. It is bundled with the new version ICP 2.1.3. When you install it on ICP, it becomes your hub cluster. It is enough to install agents (Klusterlets) on other ICP clusters (IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure etc) and they will become your managed clusters. You can then monitor the dashboard for the aggregated information across all your clusters, view the topology of resources within those clusters, or see more details by drilling down into individual clusters.

This tool is different from IBM Cloud Automation Manager, which is used for automation of IaaS (VMs) provisioning with Terraform templates and interface with Chef for configuration management. Multicloud Manager works with Kubernetes.

IBM has showcased another new platform meant for the multicloud managed services: Multicloud Management Platform (MCMP). This platform supersedes and replaces earlier Cloud Brokerage and covers platforms like IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure, Google, zCloud, VMWare etc. Optionally it is used together with IBM Services Platform with Watson (ISPW) for intelligent and automated operations. MCMP can be deployed by the client or provided as managed service. It can be shared or dedicated. It leverages the new extended partnership with ServiceNow (as of November 2018) so ServiceNow is the central component with integrated self-service portal to configure, buy, and deploy services from AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, VMWare, Google etc.

A host of other tools for the DevOps, Operations, and Governance, for multicloud, IaaS private cloud (VMs) and containers (based on ICP). I have seen well-known tools like APM for the application and infrastructure monitoring and management, but also ScienceLogic for multicloud management, as ScienceLogic has some very nice plugins for all these here-mentioned public cloud providers. Cloud provisioning can be done through many channels like vRealize, IBM Cloud Automation Manager, OpenShift, and Ansible. ICPW gives AIOps capabilities for system optimization recommendations and ML-based anomaly detection.

Managed services for the multicloud that leverage this platform are called IBM Services for Multicloud Management. More information here:

https://www.ibm.com/services/cloud/multicloud/management

Here below is chart describing the structure of MCMP. So, Multicloud Manager is tool that enables consistent management of multicloud Kubernetes environments, and MCMP is much larger. It includes container clusters, but has also governance, monitoring, compliance, backup, service management and everything else.

VMWare partnership

Think 2019 showcased and emphasized very strong and visible partnership with VMWare. I mentioned that VMWare uses Watson technology for their customer experience improvement, but the partnership goes very far. IBM Cloud for VMWare Solutions (IC4V) is a new service, which actually means the IBM hosting services and full VMWare stack on top of IBM Cloud bare metal servers.

In this context, VMWare spoke about three step approach how the clients can move to IC4V:

1. Use VMWare HCX to easily migrate VMs from customers’ own data center to IBM Cloud. The existing customer’s network is extended to the IBM Cloud
2. Once migrated to IBM Cloud, augment the existing applications with other complementary IBM Cloud services
3. Install and leverage ICP / Kubernetes. Keep your databases on traditional VMs, and use containers for web servers and other application modules

VMWare showcased NSX-T : This is a new protocol for network micro-segmentation that supports containers, VMs and bare metals. NSX-V is for VMWare only, while NSX-T supports VMWare and other hypervisors and multicloud environments, and it enables unified security policy model. NSX-V and NSX-T are not compatible, as the underlying encapsulation is not the same (NSX-V uses VXLANs, and NSX-T is based on new protocol Geneve). You can check here for more information.

Veeam : Popular third-party solution for VMWare backup and restore. Veeam is IBM’s partner and it was announced during the conference that the new version of Veeam will have better integration with IBM Cloud Object Storage (ICOS), sot that unused backups can be offloaded to cheaper ICOS. This new enhanced version of Veeam also supports backups of SAP HANA and integrates nicely with Oracle RMAN.

Cloud Security

Cloud Security was a big topic at Think 2019. Here are some new products:

IBM Cloud Key Protect: It helps provision and manage encryption keys for IBM cloud services and your cloud applications. The keys are secured by hardware security modules (HSM) based on FIPS 140–2 Level 2 encryption. There is no way the keys can be stolen. Even if the IBM cloud system admins try to intercept them or access them, the system stops any access to the keys or the data. This is suitable for Bring-Your-Own-Key (BYOK). Key Protect integrates also with IC4V for vSAN and vSphere encryption

IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services: This is your own dedicated HSM encryption management solution for Keep-Your-Own-Key (KYOK) use cases. It is single-tenant

IBM Cloud Data Shield: This is solution for application developers, which allows to create secure enclaves where sensitive data can be visible only to the application and not to the underlying OS. Enclave Manager is also available as management console with reporting functionalities.

Overall, Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud were the key topics of discussion during Think 2019. IBM’s strategy that involves Red Hat in a very powerful way is all around hybrid cloud. But another key component enabling this strategy is the infrastructure.

To continue reading about the infrastructure (including IBM Summit, quantum, mainframe and the best machine for deep learning), go to Part 3 of my story.