Many companies are opting to use a hybrid cloud approach, keeping their files stored on-premises and in the cloud. IBM Cloud Private is an application platform that assists users in managing their workloads in the private cloud.
It is designed for developing and managing on-premises, containerized applications. Essentially, IBM Cloud Private “is an integrated environment for managing containers that includes the container orchestrator Kubernetes, a private image repository, a management console, and monitoring frameworks.”
There is still quite a bit of debate about which type of storage is the most secure between on-premises or cloud computing, so sometimes corporations will continue to employ a mix of all potential options for security purposes.
Otherwise, even if a company believes that public clouds are very secure, their industry might be highly regulated to mandate that certain workloads run in private clouds. For example, the health care or financial industry might need to host their own private clouds for compliance reasons.
Beyond rules regarding compliance or security, many large corporations simply don’t want their very costly datacenters to go to waste, meaning that they’ll continue to implement these while slowly switching to the cloud over time.
What remains important in all of these cases is that the companies must have the streamlined ability to simply manage their public and private cloud environments, moving workloads between them securely.
Enter IBM Cloud Private
Because the hybrid cloud is such an important facet of many enterprises, cloud computing companies are beginning to cater more to this need. Google Cloud partnered with Cisco Systems, and Microsoft announced its own private cloud. And as more companies are coming forward with partnerships and hybrid cloud offerings, IBM Cloud Private has officially been released.
IBM Cloud Private wants to help enterprises with their ability to develop private cloud environments on-premises and to simply move workloads between private and public clouds, whether the cloud is with IBM Cloud or others competitors.
With this new service, users can create new cloud-native apps, modernize their existing apps on the cloud, and open their datacenter to work with cloud services. Legacy applications can be placed inside of containers in order to become more contemporary, giving them the ability to connect to cloud services like Salesforce with an on-premises datacenter and help the company take advantage of containers and Kubernetes container orchestration.
Support for Docker
This new software is built in Kubernetes and also supports Docker containers and Cloud Foundry framework. As you likely know, Kubernetes is open source container orchestration software originally built by Google and now is with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is used in almost every tech company, from AWS to Microsoft to VMware.
According to IBM officials, as reported by The Next Platform, IBM Cloud Private is tightly intertwined with the public IBM Cloud so developers are able to have a similar user experience, “making it easier to connect or even move applications between the IBM public and private clouds. IBM Cloud Private also is designed for easy integration and movement of apps to any public cloud because it’s based on open-container architecture.”
IBM claims that its software is different from competitors who are also offering hybrid clouds because IBM is more optimized for containers, although the Google and Cisco private cloud partnership also uses Kubernetes.
The same officials explained that IBM Cloud Private’s comprehensive containerized services offers IBM WebSphere, Db2, and MQ, which are meant to support complex enterprise applications. IBM says this software separates itself from the competition. Additionally, IBM Cloud Private is able to be “downloaded and implemented as a completely untethered private cloud on both new and existing systems.”
Utilizing public and private cloud
IBM Cloud Private in combination with their Cloud Migration Services, Cloud Deployment Services, and other new efforts to help customers with the hybrid cloud approach, enable enterprises to more effectively utilize the public and private cloud. This is not only because these companies want to help bring cloud computing to their customers, but also because these large cloud and infrastructure companies understand where the money is going in the computing industry.
In fact, Synergy Research recently released data showing that, although “IBM remains the number three cloud infrastructure provider by virtue of its strength in private cloud services,…IBM’s cloud business isn’t growing rapidly, especially compared to competitors.”
So, while IBM has a strong market share, it needs to continue to build growth in the fast-changing market of cloud computing. IDC analysts released a survey previously this year showing that “almost 80 percent of large organizations with 1,000 or more employees already have a hybrid cloud strategy in place,” while “51.4 percent are using both public and private cloud infrastructures.”
IBM Cloud Private is released at a perfect time, with an additional 29.2 percent of these large organizations claiming that they expect to use both public and private cloud infrastructures within the year. While it is difficult for some enterprises to manage their software and hardware within their own datacenters, IBM can now offer tools to ease the transition to cloud computing and containerization.
Looking at the market numbers, this is a step that IBM has to take in order to keep long-term customers, both by helping them update their old workloads and making it simpler to transfer them among their own private and public clouds.
IBM Cloud Private is able to run on IBM’s own mainframe and Power systems, as well as many other infrastructures, and can be deployed by both bare-metal systems and OpenStack distributions such as VMware. It also has many developer services included for data analytics and open source management software.
This software also allows for streamlined management across numerous different clouds. Their Security Vulnerability Advisor can continuously scan containers across the cloud, even when in flight.
IBM Cloud Private posted that version 2.1.0 is now available and detailed the differences between the versions. Additionally IBM has an active community with blogs, tips, and a large wiki with demos, tutorials, best practices, and more, to help you better understand their new technology, and, hopefully, better manage your private cloud and hybrid cloud approach.
