IBM Cloud Private – Agile Infrastructure

Overview
IBM Cloud Private enables Cloud Services and an Agile Infrastructure behind a company firewall. While Cloud Private can be deployed in the Amazon and IBM Clouds in a supported deployment case, there exists a sweet spot for companies realize the value of deploying IBM Cloud Private to expose workloads as Services, rather than Servers within their on-premises environment.

Agility and Utility
Let’s use an example of something near and dear to all of us: our mobile. We all have one (or more):

We’ve made this device ours by customizing to within an inch of its life to suit our needs. You likely have: A workout application Any number of credit card and / or banking applications Shopping applications Note that your phone is agile .. You can add / remove applications as you need. A brief use case .. You want to attend a concert: You download the application Enter your information Purchase tickets Show the e-ticket image when you arrive at the venue Snap photos, snippets, uploading like mad during the concert When all this is done .. You can delete the application to make room for other applications. Mobile Games? Yes: you might upgrade your mobile game from that jewel thing to that bird thing .. deleting the unwanted game when you’ve won.

This is also quite similar to a familiar Utility Army Knife .. we’ve all seen this one:

You use: The scissors for thread The blade for preparing food The saw for cutting wood The bottle opener for wine The file to get yourself out of prison You snap out the tool you need, use it and then snap it back when you’re finished, moving round to the next task at hand. You need not carry an entire toolbox with you .. this is something that would weigh you down. This device assures you can finish the work you need at the moment, and then move on to your next bit.

This is IBM Cloud Private: Cloud Services and Agile Infrastructure behind your firewall.

IBM Cloud Private – Innovative and Open
IBM are on to something with Cloud Private. IBM has leveraged assets from the world of Open Standards, building an execution platform that includes policy-based oversight, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and a variety of alerting and monitoring functions .. all of which are supplied OOB. Add to this the capability to deploy Services rather than Servers .. Services that include the bulk of the IBM Middleware portfolio, offerings from other vendors and applications from the Open Source Community.

This is not a ‘Rip and Replace’ effort .. This is ‘Augment and Enhance’, ‘Consolidate and Optimize’. This is Agile Infrastructure, within your on-premises and cloud environments.

IBM Cloud Private – What Does it Do?
Some high-level pillars. IBM Cloud Private:

• Provisions Cloud Services behind your firewall .. IBM offers fully-supported IaaS solutions for Cloud Private as well.
• Enables an Agile Infrastructure, where you run Services, rather than CapEx Servers, many in a PayGo pricing model.
• Has made available 100s of Services from the Catalog (think of it as an application store for your infrastructure) .. with that said, any Application packaged into a Helm Chart (by a vendor or by your company) can be deployed into a Cloud Private cluster.

Key bits: Services rather than Servers and an optimized execution model.

IBM Cloud Private – Architectural Discussion
IBM Cloud Private deploys atop commodity hardware, running on the Linux Operating System. To deconstruct:

• IBM Cloud Private exposes nodes to manage operations and enable Services.
• Applications run as Services atop the Cloud Private nodes, providing access to Open Source applications, built-in monitoring / management capabilities and the IBM Middleware catalog.
• Cloud Private has a number of Onboard services for Applications, Monitoring, Management, Alerting, Scheduling, and so on, integrating with the applications you use today.

This discussion is hyper-simplified for brevity. Please see IBM Cloud Private 3.1.0 Architecture for a deeper look, or ring me up.

The Customer Environment
By most accounts, your environment looks a bit like this:

• You’ll see several hardware, virtualization and deployment layers within.
• While you may have some automation in place, it is likely not standardized across deployment paradigms and capabilities, and it probably doesn’t give us an all-up view of how to best manage all the infrastructure assets within your organization.
• Each of the blue boxes potentially represents:
  • A licensing requirement
  • A management requirement
  • A hardware requirement ..

.. all well before we get to actually servicing the users, devices and systems that are most important to our audiences. To this, I mean:

• Recognizing CapEx licenses that require renewal
• Maintaining patch levels across all the operating systems above
• Infrastructure (hosts for VMs and / or physical servers) .. taking into account hardware refresh requirements

.. and the list goes on.

Some Notes on Workloads
When thinking about your workloads, you’ll likely realize:

• Most are running 100% of the time (atop single-purpose virtual or physical hardware)
• You’re paying for a software license 100% of the time
• These workloads are not running at capacity 100% of the time

You pay for the hardware and the licenses 100% of the time .. given the bits above, let’s think about another way to deploy these workloads. In a perfect world, how should these workloads run?

• Transient: specific-use workloads that you deploy, run and remove as your needs dictate. This is similar to the mobile device concert analogy, above. Note that these are the de facto standard for proof of concept, testing or introducing new workloads into an environment .. once you deploy Cloud Private, you can evaluate these workloads as Services, rather than deploying Servers.
• On-Demand: pre-built, pre-configured and deployed on a moment’s notice .. note that these services can be spun up and available in seconds, versus VM / Physical Server start times.
• Long-Running: Ongoing workloads for management, monitoring and alerting functions. These services are always available, at minimal PayGo cost. When they need to be scaled (dayparts, data volumes, activity), they can be, via defined policy.
• Scalable: workloads with defined criteria that can expand to available capacity; the scalability typically triggered by capacity demands and under policy. These can be Transient, On-Demand or Long-Running workloads .. Again, under policy.
• Burst: workloads scheduled during times the system is idle to increase optimization, and are scaled back to continue processing until the next burst opportunity, again, all under policy.

Ask Yourself: How many of the workloads you are running 100% of the time, consuming 100% CapEx licensing / hardware requirements might otherwise fit into one of the above paradigms?

Determine Applicability
You should have a look at IBM Cloud Private if a number of the following conditions exist in your environment:

• CapEx licenses that require renewal .. Especially where these licenses can be implemented as PayGo Services
• You’re running a lot of VMs with single or minimal workloads .. Especially where these VMs have CapEx licenses, as above
• You’re running a lot of VMs that are consuming too much of your infrastructure capacity, requiring more management than you’d like to dedicated
• You deployment includes multiple clouds (Public, Private or Hybrid)

Lots of questions above, likely requiring input from others in your organization .. Consider all the folks who have their hands on the keyboards, managing your infrastructure and deployments.

What you need:
An Agile Infrastructure session. In this session, we’ll unpack:

• Your Use Cases / Execution
• Your Deployments: Physical / Virtual
• Your Licensing: CapEx / Subscription
• Your Workload Management
• Your Cross-Workload Integration
• Your SaaS Integration Opportunities

.. and more. I can put you in touch.