CoreOS announced an initial version of the "App Container Specification", a proposed standard for building and running application containers, along with a prototype implementation called Rocket on December 1, 2014. Rocket will be an alternative to the Docker runtime. This post is to summarize a simple initial experiment and assessment on Rocket. 0. Experiment environment: A fresh virtual machine running CoreOS (VERSION_ID=522.2.0) Note: Rocket is a stand alone tool that will live outside of CoreOS itself and can be used on a variety... [More]

The IBM Cloud Manager team has released the latest version of IBM Cloud Manager based on the OpenStack Juno release! You can download the trial version, including IBM Platform Resource Scheduler here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/servicemanagement/cvm/sce/downloads.html A lot of work has gone into making the deployment of your cloud easier.   For the most common server and network configurations, there is a simple way to deploy the cloud.  Directions on how to deploy your cloud using the prescribed method can be found here:... [More]

In last few years, some of the large scale online companies including -but not limited to- Netflix, eBay and Amazon changed their application architectures to microservices architecture. It was not a revolution but evolution. They have evolved from a monolithic architecture to microservices architecture. Everybody is talking about containers, in particular, Docker. Why container technology and Docker have been catching huge attention since last year? Is microservices architecture one of the reasons behind that huge interest? To me, yes.... [More]

Tags:  microservices docker virtualization mqlight cloud containers

IMPORTANT NOTE! This article was published based on the first experimental release of the IBM Bluemix Containers service. There is now a new release in Beta of the service. The article below is no longer applicable. I will be publishing an updated article VERY soon with more information on the new service.   I can't even begin to tell you how exciting it is to have IBM Containers live now! I've been working with this project for the past few months and it's exciting to see it come to life! If you haven't check it out... [More]

There are general observations about installing IBM Cloud Orchestrator (ICO)* 2.4 on IBM SoftLayer (SL).  These notes are not meant to supercede any official IBM ICO or IBM SL documentation.  These steps assume that the user has access to the noted software packages and does not provide links or access codes to said packages. The installation can be thought of being broken down in three distinct steps: SoftLayer Configuration Installating the ICO installer Installing ICO SoftLayer Configuration     ICO expects to... [More]

Introduction The OpenStack Heat service is used to orchestrate the deployment and management of composite infrastructure and application stacks. The stacks are typically described in YAML documents called Heat Orchestration Templates (HOT). The power of HOT lies in its ability to describe even complex workload deployments in a fully declarative fashion. A given infrastructure component necessary for a successful deployment of a workload is modeled by using a resource object of an appropriate type. For example, a nova instance is described by... [More]

Tags:  hot resource plaform scheduler heat openstack prs

SDN 101: Software Defined Networking - IBM Academic Initiatives SAMEH S. ZAGHLOUL   |   Today 13:21   ‎  |   3 Views   SDN 101: Software Defined Networking Part of IBM Academic Initiatives with " Information Technology Institute " ( http://www.iti.gov.eg/ ) http://www.slideshare.net/SamehZaghloul/iti-sdn-101-v11 SDN Overview SDN Standards NFV – Network Function Virtualization SDN Scenarios and Use Cases SDN Sample Research Projects SDN Technology Survey SDN Case Study SDN Online Courses SDN Lab... [More]

http://thoughtsoncloud.com/2014/10/ibm-contributions-openstack-go-beyond-code/   #ibmcloud

http://thoughtsoncloud.com/2014/10/ibms-openstack-offerings-continue-grow/   #ibmcloud

With the latest Heat enhancements Cloud Solutions Architects can now combine the deployment of cloud infrastructure with the deployment of a software solution using the industry standard Heat Orchestration Template (HOT) documents. In other words, a single HOT document can be used to describe the infrastructure components required by a software stack as well as to specify the software components that constitute that stack.  Furthermore, the HOT syntax allows architects to map components to the containers in which they run and specify the... [More]

In today’s world of rapid innovation, everyone wants to quickly develop and deploy new applications in a scalable manner.   Many application developers and companies have quickly adopted Docker to quickly create applications. Docker allows the user to package their software in a container to ensure the application works the same way on their local system as the application will work when deployed elsewhere in production. With OpenStack, we can deploy these containers in a scalable manner using the auto-scaling groups and load... [More]

In my previous blog post   , I mentioned how easy it is to manage application deployments to hybrid clouds by defining and using blueprints for applications. Today, I want to talk about built in AutoScaling capabilities in  IBM UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns . It is very easy to create a new AutoScaling Group in your application blueprint using the steps below a) Define your Compute elements b) Associate, add the Compute elements to the Autoscaling Group c) Set Policies for Autoscale (e.g. Scale up, Scale... [More]

Presenting Software Defined Storage for Dummies – showing a great solution to your data storage and management challenges   There's a lot of buzz about cluster file systems being the ultimate Software Defined Storage (SDS ).  I couldn't agree more.  I like to think of cluster file systems as the Swiss army knife of storage -- many styles of storage possible with one cluster file system product -- high IOPS, high streaming bandwidth, or cost effective styles all possible, with high availability, high elasticity at... [More]

Enterprises are looking to leverage their systems, applications and data to provide new services for their clients across data center boundaries using hybrid cloud for private and public cloud interaction. A recently prototyped solution demonstrates an OpenStack based environment using HEAT based templates and policy resource scheduling to deploy a cloud application to a private cloud running on IBM Power Systems with connectivity to a public cloud on IBM’s SoftLayer running IBM Worklight Mobile Services. The solution showcases ease of... [More]

One of the great uses of IBM UrbanCode Deploy with Patterns (UCDP) is the ability to break up a Heat Orchestration Template (HOT) into individual components that can be reused in different combinations to form new applications.  However, one of the capabilities lost in the breaking up of the singular HOT file into individual, stand-alone Components is the ability to set and share dynamic values generated during execution of HOT scripts.  Whereas these values can be gathered and kept during the single instance execution of the HOT... [More]

Tags:  variables urbancode components deploy

The beauty of IBM's Urban Code Deploy (UCD) product is the ability of the user to build a component that can be re-used by multiple users or in multiple Heat Orchestration Templates (HOT).  That's the theory, what is the practical reality?  How do you actually build a component?  How do you make it server independent?  What does one mean by "server independent"?  In UCD, it's easy to build scripts that launch after a VM has been instantiated.  Thus, one could have complex scripts that execute... [More]

Tags:  ucd urbancode deploy hot heat

Recently Andrew Spyker blogged about his thoughts on the emergence of open-source schedulers and resource managers in parallel with the rise of Docker containers.  I’d like to give a point of view to some of the issues that were raised. In particular, I want to examine the role of resource managers and schedulers and where they fit in the overall ecosystem. There is a bit of debate about what the future state systems such as Mesos and Marathon , Kubernetes ,   CoreOS Fleet , or   Dockers’ Libswarm as Docker containers... [More]

What is infrastructure as a service (IaaS)? Michael Fork, Architect in the Chief Technology Office of IBM's Cloud Service Division, asks IBM Cloud leaders this question and gets answers that are influenced by each leader's work. Viewpoints are from Distinguished Engineer  Christopher Ferris, Chief Technical Officer (CTO)  for Cloud Interoperability in IBM Software Group (SWG),  Distinguished Engineer,  Matt Hogstrom, CTO for Software Defined Environments (SDE) in Systems and Technology Group (STG), ... [More]

Recently, OpenDaylight become the first open source project to win the the top prize at InterOp Las Vegas , the most respected networking industry trade show. This caps off a year of accomplishments that have taken OpenDaylight from nascent underdog to one of the most important open source projects in the world. One year ago at the Open Networking Summit , we announced OpenDaylight—a cross-industry consortium tasked with building an open source community and platform for Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solutions. OpenDaylight... [More]

How Does Software Defined Unleash the Power of Today's Virtualized Enviroments? Effective management and use of virtualized IT resources is a key pillar of the IBM Software Defined Environment strategy.   Of course, virtualized IT is nothing new and was invented by IBM back in the late 60s and used until today by many organization as part of Virtual Machine/370 and follow on systems.    Users and applications were allocated virtual machines that gave them virtual compute, storage and even cool things like... [More]

  Platform Resource Scheduler (PRS) adds powerful scheduling and resource optimization capabilities to OpenStack environments. It leverages the experience of IBM in handling large-scale datacenters for high-performance computing, analytics and big data and applies that to new environments. In this blog we give a flavor of how PRS can work together with OpenStack in the context of an online e-commerce store. We will explore how OpenStack with PRS features enabled can optimize the infrastructure while helping to meet an applications service... [More]

Over the past couple of months, Software Defined Environments (SDEs) have been quite a hot topic in the IT industry and for IBM. There are a number of slightly varying definitions of what SDE means – Matt Hogstrom gave a good definition in one of his recent blogs – but I want to summarize just the most important points from my perspective: SDE is all about application workloads and about using orchestration technology to provide some IT service to end users under certain qualities of services. What started out as Software... [More]

It seems that almost everywhere the rush to “Cloud” and programmable infrastructure has generated a number of conversations around Software Defined ... Software Defined Datacetners (SDDC), Software Defined Compute (SDC), Software Defined Storage (SDS), Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) to name the predominant references.  So many companies, consultants, etc. have started using the terminology but actually mean different things.  So, what does IBM mean when we talk about Software... [More]

Tags:  defined sds sdi software sdc infrastructure dynamic cloud workloads sdn virtualization sde

With the rapid increase of data, many IT organizations have the desire to use commodity storage hardware as part of their Software Defined Storage infrastructure. IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) turns commodity local or external storage into elastic, highly available enterprise cloud storage for Cloud and Big Data applications. GPFS is extremely robust from years of supporting the world's largest supercomputers, and is also very distributed and very high bandwidth, attributes great for IBM InfoSphere BigInsights Hadoop data... [More]