Cloud has emerged as the growth engine for business.
A recent survey of enterprises showed that those who adopt and leverage cloud computing for competitive advantage on average grow twice as fast and double their profit. Building an effective cloud environment requires a disciplined approach. Standards (both formal and informal) are rapidly evolving to ensure portability, interoperability (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC-38, OASIS TOSCA, IEEE P2302 etc.), and manageability of the cloud environment. IBM is well-positioned to offer end-to-end cloud solutions based on open architectures that deliver both interoperability and value to our customers across the world. Recently, IBM made major developments in the cloud. From acquiring SoftLayer last year to its commitment to invest $1.2 billion, IBM Cloud is creating exceptional opportunities for enterprises to transform business models, supply chains, and their interactions with customers and partners. Innovation around IBM's open cloud architecture is dramatically changing the entire digital fabric inside, and outside of the data center. One of them is Codename: Bluemix (Open Standards based Platform as a Service). Introduced at Pulse2014, Bluemix is a new IBM PaaS offering based on Cloud Foundry, is an open-standards, cloud-based platform for building, managing and running apps of all types (web, mobile, big data, new smart devices).
We are seeing a lot of innovations by IBM in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) layers in the open cloud architecture. Developers are empowered with increased flexibility in all the layers with IBM’s experience in supporting and validating open standards. As with OpenStack at the Software Defined Environments (IaaS) layer, Cloud Foundry is IBM’s next step in defining the open standard at the Composable Environments (PaaS) layer. Bridging the Software Defined Environments layer with the composable PaaS layer is an emerging open standard value. The benefit is better integrated tools for developers of cloud-centric applications, and as a result, an increase in developer productivity for the enterprise. The concept of composable environments, 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 of these cloud services include embedded monitoring and manageability capabilities. Developers can take advantage of these cloud services to quickly build new composable applications integrating new sensor data, wearable devices and collaborate for faster time to capability. The API Economy (SaaS) is the top layer of cloud open architecture, where end-users gain access to and leverage business applications to support the enterprise's business processes. Developing and implementing applications that take advantage of the API economy requires enhanced tools, frameworks, and programming models that are part of the PaaS layer of the cloud architecture. Cloud Foundry is the open source framework that pulls all these pieces together and is delivered from IBM in the form of Bluemix.
IBM Bluemix leverages Cloud Foundry to enable developers to rapidly build, deploy, and manage their cloud applications, while tapping a growing ecosystem of available services and runtime frameworks. Designed by developers for developers, IBM Bluemix accelerates application development and rapidly 'assemble' applications via composable services on an ease of use platform. Here are some of the key attributes offered by IBM Bluemix:
Reduce provisioning needs - application or infrastructure
Flexible capacity
Help to address any lack of internal tech resources
Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Accelerate exploration of new workloads – social, mobile, big data
Automated technical tasks
A key component in our cohesive end-to-end cloud story, Bluemix, along with SaaS applications and JazzHub (DevOps) will run on SoftLayer. IBM Bluemix is implemented into patterns (services) and included in the PureApplication appliance for on-premise PaaS or it will be offered through a hosted version of PaaS via SoftLayer (IaaS). To know more, check out the beta version of Codename: Bluemix.
We are hosting a series of 100 days of Bluemix. They are a series of 100 hands-on workshop events around the world where we will demonstrate Bluemix capabilities, build Bluemix developer skills and create Bluemix advocates within our partner community. At Bluemix days, you will have the opportunity to deploy your applications and have them running in a matter of hours. Sign up today at a location near you.
I also invite you to join us at another exciting opportunity 2014 Federal Health Care Forum on April 24th in Washington DC. I look forward to your participation. Do not forget to share your thoughts with me about Bluemix at rrmenon@us.ibm.com.
Authored by:
Ramesh Menon
Chief Architect - US Federal CTO
IBM Software Group