IBM Cloud Private “… in plain English”

IBM Cloud Private is here and the competition is heating up. After multiple workshops and client facing meetings, I realized that I wasn’t always sure how to articulate what IBM’s private cloud offering is in a few simple words. We sometimes get lost in the technical jargon and don’t always remember who the audience is, so here’s my attempt to explain ICP “in plain English”.

In a few words:

IBM Cloud Private is a platform to develop modern applications based on micro-services architectures behind the enterprise’s firewall while consuming IBM’s catalog of middleware and software .

Now let’s take each buzzword and explain it:

• Platform: A playground used by developers to develop, build, test, deploy and then scale applications.
• Modern Applications, or Cloud Native Apps: Applications that have been built natively on the cloud and have not been “lifted and shifted”. This means that they have been developed to make use of (and re-use) managed services provided by a Cloud platform such as Database as a Service (e.g. Cloudant and Compose), Elastic Caching (e.g. Redis) or API Security (e.g. API Connect). Remember that when building modern applications, developers “consume someone else’s service” more and “code from scratch” less.
• Microservices Architectures: Think of this as the next generation Service-Oriented Architecture (or SOA) that IBM pioneered. Instead of building one large monolithic application, developers split the application into small loosely-coupled applications (called services) that can be scaled, patched and updated independently. These apps know how to talk to each other to perform the actions needed.
• Middleware/Software: This means that developers will be able to consume and use IBM’s middleware and software as Docker images while building their modern micro-services application. Yes, ICP includes containerized/Docker images of many IBM software and middleware (MQ, Db2, WebSphere Liberty, DataPower, Integration Bus, Data Science Experience etc..).

Most enterprises have been mandated to modernize their applications and infrastructures. They’re looking for new platforms, new frameworks, new architectures and new vendors to help them achieve Netflix-scale agility. In Middle East and Africa, this means banks, airline companies and telecom operators want to mimic the same experience their customers perceive when using born-on-the-cloud applications.

IBM Cloud Private gives enterprises the ability to:

• Offer and Manage Container as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service.
• Refactor and modify current and legacy applications into cloud native apps. IBM Cloud Private can guide them through this process with capabilities such as the IBM Transformation Advisor and WebSphere Liberty.
• Innovate new born-on-the-cloud applications. ICP provides starter kits such as Microservices Builder and supports Open Source frameworks to jump-start their cloud-native journey.
• Protect investments. IBM Cloud Private provides the IBM Software and Middleware that clients rely on such as WAS, MQ, and Db2 etc. You can use IBM Cloud Private to run workloads on top of client’s new and refreshed Infrastructure as a Service including x86, POWER and Z… yes, Z as well.
• Safeguard and address security, risk and compliance. ICP provides the power of the cloud behind the firewall helping clients conform to strict regulations.

IBM offers a great opportunity to help clients scale and host all their new modern apps, and “cloud-ify” current and legacy apps. IBM Cloud Private is IBM’s answer to the ever-growing demand for a private cloud and modern application platform that fits the enterprise in terms of compliance, security, support and services. Not only that. IBM Cloud Private is a step towards achieving Hybrid between IBM’s public and private clouds. Applications that run on IBM Cloud Private will run on IBM Cloud Platform Container Service or IBM Cloud Platform Cloud Foundry.

Now for the geeks among us: IBM Cloud Private is a Kubernetes based platform that allows developers to push their Docker apps, push their code into Cloud Foundry or automate their cloud infrastructures using declarative Infrastructure as Code. IBM Cloud Private is built on and embraces open source.

Again, let’s take each buzzword and explain it:

• Kubernetes or K8s: Inspired by Borg which is the container orchestration platform used at Google to scale thousands of containers. Kubernetes provides self-healing, scaling, load balancing, routing etc… Kubernetes aims to provide better ways of managing related, distributed components across varied infrastructure.
• Docker: A containerization technology that allows developers to package their code, frameworks and other dependencies into a single package that can be easily moved from one environment to the other. Docker does this by providing OS-level virtualization instead of Server-level virtualization. Docker solves code portability and environment uniformity while guaranteeing that the execution environment exposed to the application will be the same in development, testing, and production. This is also referred to as Environment Parity. Docker and Kubernetes are targeted mainly at DevOps.
• Cloud Foundry: A platform that offers an opinionated, prescribed and developer-friendly tools for developers to focus only on code and not have to worry about where the code will run. Cloud Foundry is targeted mainly at developers who aren’t too comfortable with Ops.
• Infrastructure as Code: The newest way of provisioning and managing Infrastructure (Load Balancers, Firewalls, Storage, Compute etc…). Instead of writing complex sequences of provisioning tasks to spawn environments or having to clone Terrabytes of OS images, templates and environments, Infrastructure admins can now write declarative charts that tell IBM Cloud Private “this is how I want my environment to look like, figure it out yourself.” IBM Cloud Private uses Terraform to make this happen and it works on IBM Cloud Platform, AWS, Azure and OpenStack as well. Terraform is targeted at Infrastructure, SysAdmins, DevOps and the adventurous Developers.

You can try the IBM Cloud Private Community Edition at no charge!