Cloud Service Models:
- Runtimes vs middleware & frameworks
- IaaS - based on OpenStack standards & provided by SoftLayer
- IaaS competitors include AWS, Heroku, Azure)
Traditional/On-premise:
IBM strategy is PureSystems, Pure Applications, PureData
IaaS:
Manage infrastructure resources in a resource pool, with self-service provisioning, rapid elasticity, and as measured services. Virtualization alone does not
accomplish this vision and set of characteristics. After all infrastructure resources are provided and managed as a set of capacity services, the data center can be
treated as a true software-defined environment
Software defined environments is a hallmark of IaaS:
- Expressing physical infrastructure as software services that can be manipulated and automated, programmatically.
Overall infrastructure is always viewed and manipulated as a composite whole, not the network, storage, and compute as individual parts.
Standards for building Software Defined Environments ensure portability, interoperability, and manageability of the software-defined environment.
- The OpenStack Foundation has emerged as the most important consortium for the implementation of the software-defined environment by adopting many of the
cross industry standards initiatives.
SoftLayer is IBM’s BlueMix IaaS - provides a seamlessly unified global cloud computing infrastructure. It combines virtual public cloud instances, powerful bare metal servers, turnkey private clouds, and a broad range of storage, network and security devices, and services
PaaS:
The concept of composable solutions in a Cloud Operating Environment , which consists of finer grained services that can be recombined to create new capabilities, is a key element of the cloud. Composable environments can contain cloud services, which bring together operational, development, application, database, and third-party services – all with embedded monitoring and manageability capabilities. Developers can take advantage of these cloud services to quickly build new composable applications. These new applications are built as cloud-centric (designed for and deployed to the cloud) and for mobile-first UI/devices deployment
Cloud Foundry is an open standard, open source Platform-as-a-Service framework and community founded by IBM and Pivotal in 2013. Cloud Foundry runs on a broad range of cloud infrastructure platforms, including OpenStack, Amazon Web Services (AWS), VMware, and IBM SoftLayer. It also supports a wide range of application programming language run times and frameworks including Java, Ruby, JavaScript, and Python. Cloud Foundry has a large, vibrant community ecosystem of partners, vendors, and users, enabling enterprises to develop cloud-centric applications based on its open standard without fear of vendor lock-in.
SaaS:
Modern applications are increasingly composed of a wide variety of composite services that are accessed through web-scale application programming interfaces
(APIs) in order to access information and integrate with other applications. The rapid evolution and integration of social, mobile, web and traditional applications is fueling an increase in APIs. Composite applications leverage easily consumable APIs from internal and external providers across programming languages, runtimes and frameworks in a polyglot approach. The rapidly growth of APIs along with the consumerization of IT and applications is driving an economic model, where the consumption of the API may be tied to a fee or on-going subscription model, often referred to as the API economy.
The explosion in APIs is fueling a dramatic shift in the business landscape where customers, business partners, vendors, and clients can directly participate in an enterprise's business processes and gain access to enterprise data, from both inside and outside of the enterprise. APIs offer a cost-effective way to provide access to
large amounts of data and the enterprise can leverage sophisticated analytics that are available to increase the value of such data.
BlueMix and SaaS strategy and value proposition:
IBM is leveraging its middleware platforms, IBM PureSystems, IBM Worklight, OpenStack, and Cloud Foundry, to enable enterprises to build systems of
interaction. Enterprises can build next generation applications using BlueMix to leverage the evolution of systems of interaction that take advantage of existing
investments in middleware, packaged applications, line-of-business applications and business partner solutions – essentially systems of record – integrating with new cloud-centric services and applications – systems of engagement – deployed via Cloud delivery models for workload-optimized deployment.
Tying together polyglot programming, marketplaces, DevOps, and open standards is what empowers the developer to bring more value to the enterprise faster.
Strength of cloud platform and underlying infrastructure built on open standards such as OpenStack and CloudFoundry enables developers to rapidly develop, deploy, and scale applications and manage the application lifecycle. A robust ecosystem provides a rich library of easily consumable cloud services based on proven
cloud technologies that can be simply composed into a solution that is deployed with minimal effort. Solutions that are composed from these proven services are able
to be delivered to market faster and with higher quality, ultimately leading to better business outcomes.
Hypothetical Scenario: Our developer Jane on Bluemix wants to build experimental mobile apps that are designed to engage retail store clients, such as sending out a promotional discount for returning customers that happen to be passing the store on the street. One of the challenges Jane faces is that she’s not sure what kind of applications will really drive traffic into these retail stores. Are emails and text messages going to be too intrusive? What kind of promotions are going to draw in crowds?
Jane ideally wants to rapidly create applications, iterate on those experiments, and throw them away if they're unsuccessful - making sure she’s not over-investing in these experiments, should they turn out to be unsuccessful. Furthermore, Jane needs a solution that will integrate her company’s existing on-premise system– either through an API or federation to the cloud –in order to power these applications with data.
How can Bluemix meet Jane’s goals and win her (and her future customers) over?
Bluemix offers a catalogue of services, drawing from the strengths of the IBM portfolio around enterprise-grade security, Web, database management, big data analytics, cross-services and platform integration, DevOps, and more. These are known quantities- things that our clients have come to expect –when doing business with IBM. But with Bluemix we also want to make sure that we're enabling the choice of code base, language & API support, and infrastructure that will attract developers from communities that we haven't traditionally addressed in the past.
For example, Bluemix supports Ruby and Mongo-based applications. One of the things the Bluemix team found in user research is that at meet-ups, people will identify themselves with the choice of technology they use. We want to make sure we're not excluding these audiences from our new developer-focused environment, which allows us to upsell content from the rest of the IBM middleware portfolio, to this new audience of developers. Enticing new customers (and particularly new demographics) to our platform will in turn allow us to sell (for example) services like Watson, DevOps capability, security, integration, big data, etc., to Ruby and Mongo developers – audiences that may have traditionally passed over IBM because of preconceptions that our technologies are either too complex or too costly to implement as a solution to their business problems. Bluemix eliminates the barrier to entry by offering a streamlined and cost-flexible development & deployment platform.
At its core, BlueMix is an environment for building applications and leveraging a set of services to aid in the simple development of those applications.
BlueMix also provides an application hosting environment for hosting those application artifacts that run on a server. Leveraging SoftLayer, BlueMix deploys a set of virtual containers that host each deployed application and provides an environment where that application can leverage a set of pre-built services (including 3rd party services) to make application assembly easy.
BlueMix allows for its users to interact with the infrastructure via a browser-based user-interface (UI) called BlueMix user interface. For deploying web applications, a command line tool called cf is also available.
Clients (whether they are mobile applications or applications that run externally, applications that are built on BlueMix, or human using a browser) interacts with the BlueMix hosted applications via REST/HTTP APIs. Each request is routed through BlueMix to one of the application instances or its composite services.
When an application is deployed, the application developer needs to configure BlueMix with enough information to support the application.
For a mobile application, BlueMix contains an artifact that represents the mobile applications back-end - for example, the set of services that are used by the mobile application to communicate with a server.
For a web application, the application developer needs to ensure that BlueMix is told the proper runtime and framework so that it can set up the proper execution environment in which it attempts to run the application. Each execution environment (irrespective of mobile or web) is kept isolated from other application's execution environment even though they reside on the same physical machine.
At its core, BlueMix is an environment for building applications and leveraging a set of services to aid in the simple development of those applications.
BlueMix also provides an application hosting environment for hosting those application artifacts that run on a server. Leveraging SoftLayer, BlueMix deploys a set of virtual containers that host each deployed application and provides an environment where that application can leverage a set of pre-built services (including 3rd party services) to make application assembly easy.
BlueMix allows for its users to interact with the infrastructure via a browser-based user-interface (UI) called BlueMix user interface. For deploying web applications, a command line tool called cf is also available.
Clients (whether they are mobile applications or applications that run externally, applications that are built on BlueMix, or human using a browser) interacts with the BlueMix hosted applications via REST/HTTP APIs. Each request is routed through BlueMix to one of the application instances or its composite services.
When an application is deployed, the application developer needs to configure BlueMix with enough information to support the application.
For a mobile application, BlueMix contains an artifact that represents the mobile applications back-end - for example, the set of services that are used by the mobile application to communicate with a server.
For a web application, the application developer needs to ensure that BlueMix is told the proper runtime and framework so that it can set up the proper execution environment in which it attempts to run the application. Each execution environment (irrespective of mobile or web) is kept isolated from other application's execution environment even though they reside on the same physical machine.