Think 2019 — Part 4

In Part Three I wrote about the infrastructure news and announcements from Think 2019. In this Part 4, I’m sharing what I learned in the domains of Blockchain and Applications. Continue reading !

Blockchain

Here is another transformative and disruptive technology where IBM is very much invested with a range of projects. Despite the significant decline of cryptocurrency market, Hyperledger usage is growing and it is expected that by 2030 all combined blockchain technologies will create $3.1T of business value.

IBM announced availability of IBM Blockchain Platform 2.0 Beta. It is based on Kubernetes architecture, available also on-prem installation on top of ICP. It is also available on AWS platform. Composer is no longer there and smart contracts are developed with Visual Studio Code with SDK for Node.js, Java and Go. For more information, you can check here.

IBM has also announced Blockchain Health Utility Network. Several companies in the health industry have already joined this network, and the idea is to enable organizations to build, share and deploy blockchain-based solutions in healthcare. Two groups of use cases are planned : sharing health-related data and patients records, where the patients will be able to control with whom and how they will share their personal data. Another is related to payments and reimbursements based on smart contracts and real-time execution.

IBM Food Trust Network was highlighted in one of the presentations. It is a network of companies like Walmart, Carrefour and 50+ their suppliers, based on permissioned ledger. The idea is to improve trust and transparency in the food supply chain, and reduce inefficiencies created from them.

There was an interesting application that combines AI and Blockchain: Crypto Anchor Verifier that uses visual recognition to identify authenticity of various products (already used for diamonds for example) and can write the authenticated records in blockchain. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2018/05/ai-authentication-verifier/

First cryptocurrency has been created on Hyperledger mainnet. It is Metacoin, actually a utility coin. No mining, no transaction fees, and hyperledger nodes are installed on LinuxONE to ensure security and reliability. A nice combination of Blockchain and Mainframe technologies.

IBM Blockchain World Wire attracted a lot of attention. Jesse Lund answered to a lot of questions, but no new announcements he said, watch out on March 19 at Money 20/20 Asia in Singapore where there will be a special product announcement. IBM Blockchain World Wire is a new system for cross-border payments, where payment messaging and instructions for settlements can happen in real time. It is not Hyperledger-based, but uses Stellar platform (https://www.stellar.org/). Lumens (XLM) tokens are used to transfer the value from one currency to another during the money transfer. Stellar is public permissioned network (Hyperledger is private), which was forked from Ripple and is very fast , supports thousands TPS. There are no plans to convert Lumens into security tokens.

It is interesting to see that IBM makes a step aside from Hyperledger and invests in a different platform, but it makes sense as we remember that IBM mainframes run 60% of the world transactional systems. These mainframes can easily be connected to this new international payment system, if it starts gaining traction. And this should happen, as SWIFT is expensive, slow and according to some specialists creates a lot of errors (up to 10% of transactions). Another point is that Hyperledger-based trust networks can also be connected to World Wire, as these are different but complementary technologies and use cases. Check here for more information: https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/solutions/world-wire

Blockchain is a promising technology that will transform our lives in the future. It brings transparency, trust and associated efficiencies. But to reap the full benefits of it, new kind of applications needs to be built and the existing systems have to be adapted to be able to interface with Blockchain.

DevOps, Microservices and Applications

There was quite a lot of sessions around these topics, which was expected, as the application development is actually the main battlefield. I mentioned millions of developers currently participating in Red Hat projects, but in addition to this, there is also quite a lot of developers working for IBM’s clients on the maintenance and other app improvement projects. Ideally, they should join forces and create new AI and data powered applications that will move complete industries and the whole society to the new level. This is the big idea and it was reflected in the lineup of the speakers and technologies presented.

First, featuring UrbanCode. UrbanCode Deploy is the tool used for the deployment of microservices to private cloud, public cloud, multicloud etc. There is now also UrbanCode Deploy for zSystems, enabling zDevOps. Read here for more details. It is tightly integrated with Kubernetes, has more than 200 plugins, many application templates and support for Terraform.

IBM UrbanCode Velocity is a new component. It is enabler of DevOps analytics, where you can monitor the deployment frequency and compare it with the baselines. It allows pipeline aggregation and orchestration of complex application releases, automation (through tempaltes and calendars), so one can schedule daily and weekly application releases, and can also automatically create and delete the environments when necessary.

Istio Service Mesh : This is joint and open-sourced project with Google. It helps manage, interconnect and secure microservices. Service Mesh is a network of your microservices. When you have a lot of microservices, it becomes difficult to manage how they talk to each other. This is actually where Istio comes into play. Istio is built on top of ICP and IBM announced that Istio is now available oas managed service on IBM Cloud Kubernetes service. Main features of Istio are load balancing for microservices, fine-grain control, visualizations of the microservices communications. It works through three components:

• Pilot (controller),
• Citadel (for the encryption of the communications between microservices), which is very useful when you have service mesh over internet, in case of multiple Kubernetes clusters
• Mixer (providing telemetry and logging)

For more information, check here

Application Modernization

This is a large subject and IBM talked a lot of it from different angles.

IBM Cloud App Management (ICAM) : ICAM is solution for application management of microservice-based aplications. If we say that UrbanCode Deploy is rather for the Dev, ICAM is actually for the Ops part of the DevOps team. It provides end to end monitoring of applications, underlying middleware and infrastructure. With it, you can also monitor Kubernetes-managed resources. There were no new announcements, but one very good presentation on ICAM Adoption and Deployment Strategies.

ICAM has several levels : App Management Base manages traditional VMS, while App Management Advanced is adapted for Kubernetes environments on ICP and OpenShift. It requires ICP for the installation, and during the setup, one can also enable Istio Service Mesh, which becomes very important if we want to tightly control the communications between microservices or we have multicloud environment.

ICAM can show the topology of an application and its components, and you go back in time to identify eventual changes of the topology. This facilitates the discovery of changes that might have led to the performance or availability problems of the applacation. To correct the problem, one can define and use runbooks (manual or completely automated)

Next, announcement of a new product: IBM Cloud Application Platform (ICAP)

ICAP is targeted at 6000+ WAS clients looking to modernize their applications. It helps the smooth transition from the WebSphere Application Server to the next generation IBM Cloud Private (ICP) cloud application platform. It includes ICP, WAS, Transformation Advisor and IBM Cloud Garage services to help accelerate the modernization of the applications.

Trasanformation Advisor is deployed on ICP, It introspects existing WebSphere deployments (it creates application inventory and assesses modernization effort, classifying it as simple, moderate or complex) and provides recommendations, guidance and artifacts for deployment in Liberty containers and Kubernetes clouds

There is another product that was featured in one of the sessions: Microclimate. It is a beautiful tool aimed at developers for the rapid onboarding and creation of apps based on microservices. It includes its own IDE, but one can bring his/her own (VS Code, Eclipse, Atom etc). Here is the link: https://microclimate-dev2ops.github.io/

Overall, I’ve heard several approaches from different parties how applications can be migrated:

1. Example of a large UK bank:

• Migrate the VMs to cloud
• Modernize
• Containerize
• Convert into cloud-native

2. Mainframe applications:

• Install ICP
• On-premise decomposition of legacy applications into containers
• Modernize in cloud-like manner
• Extend them into public cloud

3. Another approach:

• Use Transformation Advisor
• Containerize them with Microclimate
• Deploy the containers with UrbanCode Deploy
• Monitor the deployments with UrbanCode Velocity

Developers

One of the key sessions was devoted to application developers and open source. CEO Ginni Rometty lead the panel discussion with lead developers from several organizations. Developers and open source play a key role in the new Chapter Two phase of the scaling of digital and AI. As Bob Lord, Senior Vice President of IBM said: “Growth and innovation today starts with developers and data scientists”. IBM wants to help containerize mission-critical workloads, and bring them to the ML, and post-ML world where reasoning and cognition will play even larger role. That is why developers engagement is so important. This engagement requires a lot of ground level work where Red Hat was very successful at.

We’ve heard from the panelists that the developers want two things: to be on the right wave and monetization of their work. We’ll see how the things will develop in this new triangle between IBM and its clients with legacy applications, Red Hat with open source and developer’s communities, and the external market where AI is expected to generate enormous value.

Read the next and final Part 5 of my Think 2019 report, with the review of IBM partnerships, education programs and my conclusion