IBM Cloud Private V3.1: Top Five Improvements
We are very pleased to announce the release of IBM Cloud Private V3.1! With IBM Cloud Private 3.1, you can enable your enterprise to make the journey to cloud. Below are five of the top upgrades and enhancements offered in IBM Cloud Private V3.1.
1. Simplified getting started and easier updates
Stand up time for new clusters of more than five nodes has been dramatically decreased: Images and supporting Helm charts for the platform now allow you to take advantage of the in-cluster image registry and Helm repositories, ensuring that nodes only pull images that are required for specific roles.
Start small and add additional services as needed: Management services can all be individually enabled or disabled as part of the initial install. Modify existing clusters through the catalog or through the “addon” task from the installer without impacting existing apps on the cluster.
See Enabling and disabling IBM Cloud Private management services for more details.
Use “addon” from the installer to add or remove management services.
Get more feedback when system requirements are not satisfied: All system requirements from compute, memory, filesystem, and network are now validated as part of installation with soft warnings when discrepancies are found. If you want to try new options, you can re-run the installer easily without first having to uninstall.
2. Kube gets an upgrade! Calico gets an upgrade! Everybody gets an upgrade!
Enjoy the latest versions of core platform components: You can now use all the features of Kubernetes Version 1.11.0 with support for x86, POWER, and IBM Z architecture. The default, software-defined networking provider is now Calico 3.1.3. To keep an eye on everything going on in your container world, use the latest dashboard features from Grafana 5.2.0 with metrics collected with Prometheus V2.3.1.
See IBM Cloud Private components for an overview of its container manager (Docker) and its container orchestrator (Kubernetes).
If you’re already running Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) and want to bring over your IBM middleware workloads, no problem! As part of the IBM and Red Hat partnership that was announced earlier this year, you can now have a single supported stack. Red Hat-certified versions of IBM software are available through IBM Cloud Private’s Catalog on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
See IBM Cloud Private on Red Hat OpenShift for more details.
3. Streamlined user experience
Deploy even more catalog content with fewer required parameters: Easily find the Helm charts you’re looking for by using a simplified category-based filtering of the catalog. As always, you can use the quick search filter to find items by name or keyword. For instance, from the Catalog, simply click Data to see Helm charts for Data. When you select a chart, only the most important parameters are surfaced in the Quick Start section, with intelligent choices for all default values. When you need to tweak the details, you can optionally adjust any parameter value under All Parameters.
Enhanced Cloud Foundry deployment and updated web console: The Cloud Foundry install process uses a containerized delivery model just like IBM Cloud Private’s installation model. The Cloud Foundry web console now sports visibility for your applications, your services, and a catalog of brokered services as well. You can even leverage the Open Service Broker API on Kubernetes to host data and transactional services used by your Cloud Foundry applications.
Set up your command line with a few quick curl commands: The IBM Cloud Private CLI page is much more consumable, with easy access to all the command line tools that help you manage applications, containers, infrastructures, services, and other resources. For example, you can install Kubectl CLI from the IBM Cloud Private CLI page in the management console.
See Installing the IBM Cloud Private command line interface (CLI) for more details.
Configure your command line with a few curl statements.
Create services from Open Service Brokers from the management console: With Open Service Broker API V0.1.26, you can create brokered services for all of your in-cluster applications. Open Service Brokers can be packaged as Helm Charts and deployed from the Catalog. With the simplified broker service deployment experience, you can choose to bind the service during the deployment or after the deployment. Additionally, you can now view the image logos for your services.
View metrics right away: You can get key metrics using out-of-the-box dashboards, such as Elasticsearch, etcd, GlusterFS, and Calico, to monitor the health of the platform and management services.
See Metering, monitoring, and logging for more details.
4. Isolated workloads and data with consistent auditing
Manage role-based access control across all core services data: All container information collected by metrics, logging, and metering is now isolated across namespace boundaries. By adding or removing a namespace to a team, you can control who can view what.
See Role-based access control for more details.
Audit all the things: Audit logs are now collected for all management services, in addition to Kubernetes itself. Like all management data, audit logs are namespace-scoped for viewers who have the Auditor role. Search audit logs using Kibana or the Elasticsearch API to find what you’re looking for.
See Auditing in IBM Cloud Private for more details.
Manage certificates with Kubernetes CustomResourceDefinition (CRD): Managing TLS certificates can be tedious. With a simple YAML addition to your applications, you can generate and manage certificates with the new Certificate manager service. Using a declarative format makes it easy to create and mount a certificate into your Kubernetes application or Ingress.
See Creating certificates for more details on cert-manager, IBM Cloud Private’s Kubernetes certificate manager service.
Integrate IBM Cloud Private with SSO: Configure single sign-on (SSO) between IBM Cloud Private and your enterprise identity source.
See Configuring single sign-on for more details.
5. More storage options
Use the new Object Store based on Minio. You can deploy and use Object Store completely within the cluster simply by deploying it from the Catalog. Minio offers an S3-compatible API and is easy to use for a variety of application purposes.
See Minio, the lightweight Amazon S3-compatible object storage server for more details.
Deploy Object Store onto the platform
Deploy GlusterFS after install directly from the Catalog. You can now deploy the GlusterFS Helm chart, ibm-glusterfs, directly from Catalog. Use the new Category filter to find the Helm chart in the Storage category.
See Configure GlusterFS storage on the nodes for more details.
Apply Rook management with a Ceph distributed storage system directly from the Catalog. You can deploy the alpha-version of the Helm chart object, block, and file storage in one unified system.
See Ceph block storage by using Rook for more details.
Look for more storage options coming to the community catalog!
Originally published at www.ibm.com on October 10, 2018.
