Welcome to IBM Cloud

Cloud computing can be complex and confusing, but we’re here to help you make sense of it. This is a technically focused set of pages that will allow you to explore the technology, see the latest best practices, and help you begin to master the IBM Cloud.

This page is still taking shape, but it should always be in an “under construction” mode, as we remove links that are no longer relevant, and add links to new relevant materials. The idea here is not to give you EVERY possible link on a topic, but instead to steer you to content that is high quality, and that has been applied in the real world.

The structure here is important. On this page are links for people getting started with using these technologies on IBM Cloud.

Contents

Introduction - Getting Started

IBM Cloud - a Platform as a Service (PaaS)

The IBM Cloud is a PaaS product which provides a wide array of services and capabilities that allow you to move your computing workload to a scalable and “on demand” foundation. Some of these services are in the category of “Infrastructure as a Service” (or IaaS), some of them are in the category of “Software as a Service” (or SaaS), and some are “Functions as a Service” (or FaaS). Give the marketing folks some more time and they will come up with some new “as a service” category.

The general idea is to use digital resources on an “as needed” basis, and to pay for them on an “as used” basis. This allows organizations to avoid buying hardware and software that is underutilized or ignored. When coupled with the concepts of DevOps and microservices architectures, the IBM Cloud platform can become a key foundation for a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.

The IBM Cloud was once based on Cloud Foundry (although this is evolving), which is an open source cloud application platform for developing and deploying enterprise cloud applications. Now the platform is evolving to a platform based on Identity and Access Management, or IAM. IAM uses the concept of Resource Groups to manage your services and applications on the IBM Cloud.

References for Further Reading

IBM Softlayer - an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Softlayer is the IBM Cloud IaaS product which provides a wide array of infrastructure capabilities that allow you to move your computing workload to a scalable and “on demand” foundation. These are exposed within the IBM Cloud interface as “Infrastructure”, and allow you to select from different resource options like Devices, Storage, Network, Security, as well as some add-on services.

References for Further Reading

IBM Cloud Terms and Topologies

In traditional Cloud environments, and when using deployment technologies like Kubernetes for deployment into those envirtonments, it is important to know something about how applications are expected to respond to changes in the environment. The important thing to understand is some of the basic concepts, and have an understanding f the terminology being used.

A Geography is a large geographical area, which may contain multiple Regions. IBM Cloud users will deploy their applications into Regions that they specify (like US East or US South). Regions will consist of either one Zone (in which case it is referred to as a Single Zone Region or SZR), or at least three Zones (in which case it is referred to as a Multi Zone Region or MZR). A Zone is a logically isolated Data Center in a Region with independent electrical, mechanical and network infrastructures isolated from other Zones.

When used in conjunction with Kubernetes, an MZR can provide a level of highly-available (HA) capability for an application.

References for Further Reading

Architecting Cloud Applications

In traditional Enterprise application development it is assumed that the underlying infrastructure has 99.999% availability and that applications can be scaled by adding more hardware. The ops focus is largely at the infrastructure level. Cloud applications are more typically based on micro-service architectures, which put the ops and reliability focus on the application. This distinction is important and critical, and it represents a paradigm shift for most application architects and developers.

When architecting cloud applications, you need to be aware of the fact that Cloud resources are just like your old on premise hardware resources - they fail from time to time. Using microservices and cloud you should be able to distribute “copies” of your microservices to different cloud locations, making them more resilient. Don’t depend on “the Cloud” to do it for you. In this way you can more easily tune and scale your overall application (adding more microservice instances to address bottlenecks), as well as making it more resilient and flexible.

References for Further Reading

Support on the IBM Cloud

In traditional support scenarios, support comes along with the purchase of product licenses. How does support work when you are just paying for what you use on the IBM Cloud? Is my support metered too? Do I have to pay by the ticket? No, you don’t. Support on the IBM Cloud looks like this:

If you are like me, you use an unpaid (either trial or free) IBM Cloud account. You are not paying anything for using it. For these accounts, you begin with just preliminary support. It means that you start with just very simple support - no support for the services on the IBM Cloud, just for the Cloud infrastructure itself.

Creating tickets is available to EVERYONE within the context of their own account. In the context of another account (like most individual user situations), this ability is granted to particular users. This is done through account management on the IBM Cloud (read more about IAM here).

Once an account starts to spend money, they get BASIC support. This gets you 24 x 7 access to the IBM Cloud technical support team through support cases. Phone and chat are available for these customers, but there are no SLA’s (service level agreements), and responses may not be as quick as you might like. This support is still kind of basic (thus the name).

If you want something a bit more robust, you can pay for ADVANCED support. This gets you 24 x 7 access to the IBM Cloud technical support team through support cases, phone and chat. There are some specific SLA’s for different severity levels of support case. Responses may not be as detailed as you might want, but IBM Support will give your case some priority. This is typically what we would suggest for a customer that has one or two production applications deployed or dependent on the IBM Cloud.

If you want something even more robust, you can pay a little more for PREMIUM support. Premium support gives you the usual access to support tickets, phone and chat. The SLA’s for Premium support are even more responsive than those associated with the Advanced support plan (which is what you would expect). In addition to better priority and quicker responsiveness, you also get access to IBM experts, which can help you when you are looking at strategic uses of the IBM Cloud. You will also get an Technical Account Manager assigned to you - and they will help you manage your support tickets, and make sure that the IBM Cloud is providing value to you. This contribution to your business goals is covewred in. quarterly business reviews. This is typically what we would suggest to a customer that has a large number of applications either deployed or dependent on the IBM Cloud - where the IBM Cloud is a major part of your IT infrastructure.

References for Further Reading

Infrastructure Services and APIs

Compute

Compute resources include bare metal servers and virtual servers, as well as VMware resources. These resources are used in a cloud environment to provide computing power and server capabilities for a customer. You have the ability to specify a number of vCPUs (up to 64 of them), your network performance, some local storage (SAN), with the ability to select from multiple data centers located in a number of different countries.

References for Further Reading

Storage

Cloud Object Storage (COS) is one form of storage available to users of the IBM Cloud platform. Cloud Object Storage provides storage in the cloud of a persistent set of objects - for later retrieval. You can store, manage and access your data via a self-service portal and RESTful APIs.

References for Further Reading

Network

Network services on the IBM Cloud can be used to configure your Cloud applications and resources for secure operation and development. This includes things like load balancers, content delivery networks, domain name services (DNS), gateway appliances for security, firewalls, direct linking for private connections to the IBM Cloud, VPN’s, VLAN’s, subnets and everything that you might want to configure in your Cloud deployed resources.

In 2019 a new functionality was introduced to the IBM Cloud, called Virtual Private Cloud, or VPC. This allows you to create your own “private” cloud, virtually, on the IBM Cloud.

References for Further Reading

Security

Deploying securely is always an issue for people using any cloud infrastructure. It’s important to remember that there are many different aspects to security - from the security and roles associated with specific users in the development environments, to the access and security of the production environments.

References for Further Reading

-Cloud App Security: What Makes a Secure App? - A quick 5 minute overview of security basics when working on the Cloud. Some good links and a good introduction to the concepts and terminologies that matter for security.

Containers

A container is a standard way to package an app and all its dependencies so that the app can be moved between environments and run without changes. Containers in the IBM Cloud are Docker images, from your Docker registry, that are deployed on Kubernetes. This is how you should deploy your microservices based applications for improved scalability and survivability.

A key piece of Kubernetes functionality is provided by Istio, a microservice mesh that includes routing, ingress control, microservice discovery, and other benefits for your Kubernetes cluster. Istio is a joint effort by IBM, Google, Lyft,

If you are curious abut how to structure your project which will deploy to production on Kubernetes, you should probably read the tutorial Best practices for organizing users, teams, applications in Kubernetes. It will guide you through the process of establishing a project and providing a CICD development environment for your development teams.

You might also want to look into using Open Shift, if you don’t have a definite idea of how you want to implement your CI/CD pipelines and work environments. You can learn more about the differences between Kubernetes and Open Shift by watching this quick video on Kubernetes and OpenShift: What’s the Difference?.

References for Further Reading

VMware

VMware Cloud Foundation® (VCF) and vCenter Server (VCS) on IBM Cloud provide the fundamental building blocks that include VMware vSphere, vCenter Server (VCS), and shared storage options including vSAN, needed to flexibly architect a VMware software–defined data center (SDDC) solution that best fits your workloads.

By using advanced automation and single–tto the client in a matter of hours. At this point, the client can access and manage the IBM–hosted environment via the native VMware clients, Command Line Interface (CLI), existing scripts, or other familiar vSphere API–compatible tools.

References for Further Reading

Platform Services and APIs

APIs

Ipso facto lipitor walla-walla

References for Further Reading

Application Services

Though it’s listed under Databases, Messages for RabbitMQ routes messages between microservices for modern applications. Messages for RabbitMQ makes RabbitMQ even better by managing it for you and allowing you to focus on development of your microservices and your overall architecture.

References for Further Reading

Blockchain

Blockchain is one of the most talked about new technologies in recent memory. It is popular because it holds the promise of maintaining an unmutable hyper-ledger, meaning that a chain of events which cannot be modified or corrupted. This serves as the foundation for many crypto-currencies like Bitcoin and Etherium. Blockchain can also be used to manage contracts, financial transactions, supply chain, health data, and other types of use cases where there is a need for a shared ledger, with full auditability and security.

References for Further Reading

Cloud Foundry Apps

Cloud Foundry allows you to develop applications using certain packaged environments, known as buildpacks. These buildpacks provide the runtime environment for your application, and allow you to build and deploy this application on the IBM Cloud.

References for Further Reading

Data and Analytics

This area is huge - and contains a variety of different database technologies, analytics platforms and technologies, data science tools and platforms (like the Data Science Experience, or DSX), and even Watson Machine Learning (WML). We’re just going to cover the highlights here, and provide some good starting points for where to learn more.

The Cloudant NoSQL DB is often used as a solid no SQL option for storing JSON and other unstructured types of data. It is compatible with CouchDB (and uses some of the same tools).

The Data Science Experience is used by data scientists as a single area with common tools and visualization technologies for their data science work. Often these data science efforts will be used to build a Watson Machine Learning (WML) model.

References for Further Reading

Code

Cloudant

DB2

DevOps

The IBM Cloud platform supports a variety of DevOps services, which help organizations create software development toolchains and environments for doing Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). These allow you to provide an Agile development environment where changes are built and deployed in an automated manner, allowing teams to move quickly into development environments, integrating code as they deliver.

In March 2018, IBM released a Cloud delivery environment called Microclimate. It claims to be able to deploy to multiple Cloud environments, and is built to provide an end to end development environment that lets you rapidly create, edit, and deploy applications. Applications are run in Docker containers from day one and can be delivered into production on Kubernetes through an automated DevOps pipeline using Jenkins. Microclimate can be installed locally or on IBM Cloud Private. it sounds pretty sharp, but it’s new so we don’t know how wonderful it really is yet.

References for Further Reading

Finance

This area of the catlog is filled with a series of third-party financial applications and services. This changes over time, and we don’t have a lot of direct experience in working with these services. Some of them look to be quite interesting and powerful - we suggest that you do your homework and research the capabilities, capacity, and costs associated with any of these services.

Functions

IBM Cloud Functions (based on Apache OpenWhisk) is a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform which executes functions in response to incoming events and costs nothing when not in use. This is more commonly referred to as Serverless Computing. Serverless is a way to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers. Serverless applications don’t require you to provision, scale and manage any servers.

References for Further Reading

Integrate

There are a few different services included under the integrate category of services. By their nature, these services tend to have a lot in common with other services and service areas. Some of the more popular ones are the Secure Gateway and API Connect services.

The Secure Gateway Service provides a quick, easy, and secure solution for connecting anything to anything. Rather than bridging your environments at the network level like a traditional VPN that begins with full access and must be limited from the top down, Secure Gateway provides granular access only to the resources that you have defined.

API Connect is a comprehensive end-to-end API lifecycle solution that enables the automated creation of APIs, simple discovery of systems of records, self-service access for internal and third party developers and built-in security and governance. Using automated, model-driven tools, create new APIs and microservices based on Node.js and Java runtimes — all managed from a single unified console.

References for Further Reading

Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a huge topic all by itself. it refers to the small devices and sensors that operate in the real world, on the edge of the internet, in various different “things” like smart watches, weather sensors, RFID tags, wearable tech, and other devices. This section is just going to serve as a gateway into your dive into IoT on the IBM Cloud if this is something that you are pursuing. At some point in the future, this may be large enough and broad enough to warrant a full landing page of it’s own.

References for Further Reading

Mobile

Mobile services are specific to mobile platforms and the applications that run on those mobile platforms. Typically this means cellular phones, but mobile platforms are expanding and beginning to encompass more than that.

References for Further Reading

Security

Security is something that you need to seriously consider when constructing cloud based applications and systems. The IBM Cloud offers a variety of Security services, but you need to make sure that your approach to security covers multiple levels from multiple perspectives.

If you are doing penetration testing or load testing of IBM Cloud based applications, please let the IBM Cloud team know about this. otherwise our IBM Cloud security team and security infrastructure could shut down your application, mistaking your testing as a DDOS attack or some other security event.

References for Further Reading

Events and Logs

Good security for cloud based applications is a concern for ALL organizations. Securing software requires a deep understanding of the data being managed, and then ensuring that only appropriate access is granted to the appropriate parties. The IBM Cloud services are designed to provide the basic building blocks to achieve this - but like any tool or technique, they need to be properly exercised to be effective.

Customers will find some IBM Cloud services of particular interest when it comes to the logging of events, the analysis of those logs, monitoring of services and applications, and the general support of a production application. The IBM Cloud Log Analysis service automatically collects data from selected IBM Cloud services, with no instrumentation necessary. The service allows you the flexibility to monitor and analyze logs on the IBM Cloud, using Kibana dashboards, or use the Log Analysis API to push data to other logging services and repsitories.

The IBM Cloud Availability Monitoring service can be used to monitor application and cloud service availability, as well as application/service responsiveness. Responsiveness and performance monitoring can be driven by sythetic tests driven by Selenium scripts. The closely related IBM Cloud Monitoring service can be used to automatically collect metric data from IBM Cloud applications and services, eliminating the need for agents. APIs make it easy to add custom metrics and to query your monitoring data.

Platform level logging of events is facilitated via the IBM Cloud Activity Tracker service. It will capture user and application interactions with your provisioned IBM Cloud resources. Store captured events as long as you require, safe guarded on cloud based storage solutions. Query your collected event data via API, or export your cloud activity data for further analysis.

References for Further Reading

IBM Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

You can manage users across the IBM Cloud platform and Infrastructure services from the Users page for your account. This utilizes the Identity & Access Management (IAM) interface. Using this interface, you have the ability to limit the access of IBM Cloud users to certain areas of your IBM Cloud footprint (spaces and organizations), as well as limiting the access and roles for a user based on a particular service. You can also create Service IDs, which will limit the scope and access of a particular service (or set of services). By creating and assigning keys for these users and services, you have the ability to limit access and visibility for both individual users aand services. By rotating your keys (deleting and recreating new keys) on a regular basis, you are able to keep your IBM Cloud infrastructure secure.

References for Further Reading

App ID

Use the IBM Cloud App ID service to add authentication to your mobile and web apps and protect your back-end systems. You can also host user profile info that you can use to build engaging experiences. App ID supports authentication using social identity providers, so that users can log-in with their existing Facebook and Google accounts. This is meant to support user authentication, and should not be your only security consideration.

References for Further Reading

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a hot topic recently. It is a European regulation that covers how data is stored, protected, and handled. This isn’t really a security topic in the way that most people think of security, as they consider approaches securing applications and identities. It’s in the security section because it addresses DATA security.

References for Further Reading

Watson

Watson and all of the cognitive capabilities of IBM are exposed as services on the IBM Cloud platform. This topic is huge, and there is a whole GitHub repository (similar to this one), focused on the Watson services. For information on specific Watson services, see that repository.

The Watson cognitive services can be broken up into some rough groupings that characterize how we think, and the capabilities that are available today. These areas are:

References for Further Reading