What’s New for IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management V1.3.0
Authors: The Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management Information Development team
The latest release of the IBM Cloud Pak™ for Multicloud Management is now available. With the 1.3.0 release, you can manage your hybrid applications across containers and VMs no matter where they run.
What is the Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management?
The Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management is an open, hybrid cloud management platform that helps organizations break down IT silos and move operations “to the left”. If you are not familiar with the “move to the left,” it simply means that Operations teams are starting to codify tasks and processes and manage them as code artifacts. In fact, many leading DevOps shops are managing Ops in the exact same way that they manage application logic!
The Cloud Pak is a set of open, pluggable tools built around a core application and governance model. The reason this application and governance model is the center of the Cloud Pak is that it enables disparate teams to come together around a common understanding of what the application is and how it is behaving. Without this “lingua franca”, communication between siloed teams can easily break down.
The four pillars
We also extend this model to the underlying infrastructure of the application to give users a “top to bottom” view of the application. With the inclusion of infrastructure lifecycle management, the four pillars of the Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management come quickly into view:
- Application Lifecycle Management
2. Infrastructure Lifecycle Management
3. Performance Monitoring
4. Governance Risk and Compliance Management
Let’s take a dive into what each one of these means for users.
Application Lifecycle Management provides you with unified and simplified options for constructing and deploying applications and application updates. With these functions, developers and DevOps personnel can create and manage applications across environments through channel and subscription-based automation.
Infrastructure Lifecycle Management enables two distinct capabilities: 1) deploying and managing VMs and Kubernetes clusters and 2) self-service capabilities to orchestrate resources. For Kubernetes, we enable enterprises to create, import, and manage clusters across different cloud providers. For VMs, we can extend the current VM management tools that enterprises use to improve visibility and control and help those getting started with hybrid cloud VM management. Across VMs and Kubernetes, we leverage Terraform and Service Automation for multicloud, a self-service management tool that empowers developers and administrators to meet business demands.
Performance Monitoring gives Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) a consistent monitoring method across the enterprise to any public or private cloud. Our monitoring capabilities puts our core application model to work by enhancing application resiliency for microservices based applications in addition to monitoring for traditional resources across enterprises.
Governance Risk and Compliance ensures that applications meet the security and compliance requirements of the enterprise, which is critical in managing a hybrid application. With IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management v1.3, we deliver system dashboards that provide context to security and compliance findings for both applications deployed to Kubernetes and on traditional VMware/VM environments.
Award-wining Cloud Pak!
The Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management is a SILVER award winner from Edison!
The Edison Award is a widely renowned global award that is dedicated to recognizing and honoring the best in business and innovation since 1987. This year, entries to the Edison Award faced an extensive panel of over 3,000 judges, who were comprised of leading business executives from around the world.
To learn more about IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management version 1.3, see the documentation. For more information about everything that’s new or changed in this release, see the release notes.
Top new features and enhancements in IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management v1.3.0
1. Run on Red Hat® OpenShift Container Platform version 4.3
You can now install the Cloud Pak on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3 in addition to versions 4.2 and 3.11.
2. View details on the console’s main overview page
Previously, the Application and Govern risk dashboards in the console had an Overview tab. Now, the overview page for the entire console provides additional high-level details from these components. This page also shows infrastructure data from CloudForms, if configured. CloudForms data also appears on the Govern risk dashboard.
3. Specify multiple cloud providers for templates
Today, there is API support to deploy a template and target multiple clouds by using a list of cloud connections. In this release of the Cloud Pak, we have introduced UI support to allow users to specify multiple providers while either creating or editing a template. During template deployment, the user is prompted for multiple cloud connections if the template is associated with more than one provider. This allows resources to be connected as part of a single deployment.
4. Monitor your application performance and availability with default Synthetic tests
After you deploy an application on the Cloud Pak management console, by default Synthetic tests are created automatically to monitor your application performance and availability. In a Synthetic test, a simple REST API call pings either the Ingress endpoint of a service on a specific path or a webpage test and obtains the performance and availability results. Synthetic test results can serve as a gate to move code from one channel to the next depending on whether the test results reach the performance and availability requirement. For example, from staging, test, and production.
5. Automate agent integration
You can automate agent integration to the Cloud Pak, and take advantage of large-scale bulk deployments during off-peak hours. You can also use Red Hat Ansible Tower to automate and streamline greenfield deployment in the Cloud Pak. A greenfield agent is an agent that can be installed directly on your VMs for either on-premises or Kubernetes clusters.
6. Utilize the new JBoss data collector
You can use the new JBoss data collector to monitor the JBoss Application Server in both Kubernetes and on-premises environments.
Key benefits to our users
The Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management offers key benefits and capabilities to the following users:
Developers can code new microservices and cloud native applications, instead of worrying about infrastructure or platform provisioning.
Operations (Ops) specialists can discover the traditional and modern services of the application, deploy applications by using the DevOps pipeline to drive a consistent process for delivering changes, and ensure that applications meet their goals of stability and security.
Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) can complete the following tasks:
- Maintain application availability, reliability, and performance from the product user’s perspective.
- Create runbooks to automate responses to incidents, and apply critical updates to production environments without impacting users.
- Respond to and recover from various outages in underlying IaaS or CaaS services and prevent security breaches.
- Provide developers access to relevant logs, events, and performance metrics necessary to troubleshoot and quickly resolve problems.
Security and Compliance Engineers can create policies, assign policies to clusters, view policy compliance status, look for security incidents and check code vulnerabilities. You can ensure that clusters are configured according to corporate security policies and applications are securely coded.
How to get started with the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management
To purchase the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management as a download from IBM Passport Advantage, contact your IBM sales representative at 1–844–952–5683. Use the priority code: Cloud. See the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management product page for all the details.
For details on how to download the software files after purchase, see the IBM Passport Advantage part numbers topic.
A new ordering option for a trade-up part number is also available. If you’re an existing monitoring client (ITM/ITCAM/APM/ICAM), you can now trade up to the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management by contacting your IBM sales representative at 1–844–952–5683. Use the priority code: Cloud.
Seeing is believing
To explore the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, watch the Cloud Pak demos that are available on IBM Demos.
Copyright IBM Corporation 2020
