IBM has released IBM Cloud Private, a platform designed to enable companies to create on-premises cloud capabilities similar to public clouds, with the goal of accelerating "cloud native" application development and supporting modernisation of existing applications running on IBM technology such as WebSphere Liberty, Db2 and MQ. The new platform is built on the open source Kubernetes-based container platform, and supports deployment of applications as Docker containers within all of the offering price tiers, and the deployment of applications via Cloud Foundry using the optional add-on within the "Cloud Native" and "Enterprise" tiers.
IBM Cloud Private is offered in three pricing tiers: Community Edition, Cloud Native and Enterprise. All three tiers provide an integrated environment for managing containers that includes the Kubernetes container orchestrator platform, a private Docker image repository, a management console, and monitoring frameworks.
The Community Edition is intended for non-production use, and is limited to one Kubernetes master node. This is available as a free download (registration required); the commercial Cloud Native and Enterprise offerings are supported for production usage, and provide 40+ community services including developer editions of IBM software, Postgres and MongoDB, and also include IBM WebSphere Liberty, IBM Microservices Builder, and the IBM SDK for Node.js. The Enterprise version of IBM Cloud Private also includes additional enterprise software such as IBM WAS ND, IBM MQ Advanced and IBM API Connect.
IBM has also announced new container-optimized versions of core enterprise software, such as IBM WebSphere Liberty, Db2 and MQ. It should be noted that the jury is still out in regards to whether running databases within a container is a good idea, although Uber has recently discussed how they run MySQL packaged within Docker at a large-scale.
The IBM developerWorks blog states that more than 12 million Java and enterprise developers are managing legacy WebSphere and Db2 applications, and IBM Cloud Private allows them to containerise these legacy systems as "cloud native" applications that run behind the firewall or as part of a hybrid cloud strategy.
IBM's use cases for private and hybrid cloud computing.
IBM is keen to stress that it is committed to open source projects, the commercial entities behind them, and to the emerging cloud native developers community. In 2014, IBM became Docker's first enterprise partner and the first to sell and support Docker EE. IBM was also a founding Platinum sponsor of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, and the IBM Bluemix platform was built on top of Cloud Foundry. IBM is also a Platinum member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and has become an active contributor to the Kubernetes project as well. The IBM Code section of the developerWorks web portal also offers a series of patterns for cloud, container and microservice development.
The competition within the private and hybrid cloud markets is becoming increasing fierce: Microsoft offers their Azure Stack solution for organisations looking to run Azure on private data centers; Google and Pivotal have recently joined forces to offer the Cloud Foundry BOSH and Kubernetes-powered Pivotal Container Service (PKS), which can run on VMware vSphere or Google Cloud Platform (GCP); and AWS currently offer VMware Cloud on AWS, which enables organisations to run applications across operationally consistent VMware vSphere-based private, public, and hybrid clouds.
Additional information on IBM Cloud Private can be found on the IBM website, and the installation instructions for the community edition can be found with the IBM GitHub repository.