Overview

Built on IBM WebSphere® offerings and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Cloud Pak for Applications provides a long-term solution to help you transition between public, private, and hybrid clouds, and create new business applications.

Starting with version 5.3, three editions are available:

• Cloud Pak for Applications Standard, which offers modernization tools such as IBM Transformation Advisor and IBM Mono2Micro to assist with your move to the cloud, and developer tools to build and deploy your new cloud-native applications with the IDE of your choice
• Cloud Pak for Applications Limited, which offers the same benefits as Cloud Pak for Applications Standard, with the exception of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Runtimes.
• Cloud Pak for Applications Advanced, which offers the same benefits as Cloud Pak for Applications Standard and adds WebSphere Automation for security and server health management, and IBM Fusion software, a container-native, hybrid cloud storage platform that offers simplified deployment and data storage management for Kubernetes applications on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

You can install Cloud Pak for Applications on a supported version of Red Hat OpenShift in any public or private cloud.

Benefits

• Develop innovative cloud-native applications with the tools and runtime of your choice.
• Modernize your applications faster and make them more secure. Cloud Pak for Applications speeds development of applications built for Kubernetes to access cloud services.
• Run your existing applications where they are, and deploy your modernized and new cloud-native applications to the cloud in containers.
• Rapidly build and deploy the next generation of multi channel and engaging digital apps, including mobile, wearables, conversation, web, and PWAs.
• (Advanced Edition) Monitor your WebSphere Application Server or WebSphere Application Server Liberty estate for security exposures or server health issues and easily remediate them.
• (Advanced Edition) Simplify your deployment and data storage management for Kubernetes applications running on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Bundled products included with Cloud Pak for Applications

IBM Cloud Pak for Applications provides several software offerings in one bundle. You can choose to deploy some or all the purchased software. For a list of all software in Cloud Pak for Applications, see Installing.

WebSphere Application Server

WebSphere Application Server, with its traditional and Liberty runtimes, offers production-ready, standards-based Java™ EE compliant architectures. WebSphere runtimes in DevOps workflows make it easy to integrate WebSphere into modern toolchains and DevOps implementations. This enables secure, flexible, and efficient access to internal or external software components and services. WebSphere support for IBM Cloud Private, public clouds, traditional servers, and Docker container deployments provides seamless hybrid topologies.

Cloud Pak for Applications includes the WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment, WebSphere Application Server, and WebSphere Liberty Core editions.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (Standard and Advanced editions only)

Red Hat OpenShift is a leading enterprise Kubernetes platform that provides a security-focused, consistent foundation to deliver applications anywhere and with streamlined developer workflows to get to market faster. Red Hat OpenShift delivers a comprehensive solution for hybrid cloud, enterprise container, and Kubernetes development and deployments. It includes an enterprise-grade Linux operating system, container runtime, networking, monitoring, container registry, authentication, and authorization solutions. These components are tested together for unified operations on a complete Kubernetes platform that spans every cloud.

Red Hat Runtimes (Standard and Advanced editions only)

Red Hat Runtimes provides a set of open runtimes, tools, and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications. It offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly distributed cloud architectures, such as microservices.

WebSphere Automation (Advanced edition only)

WebSphere Automation provides automated security and server health operations for a WebSphere Application Server or WebSphere Application Server Liberty server estate, including the following use cases:

• Automated vulnerability identification and notification
• Automated vulnerability remediation and resolution
• Registered estate tracking, management and audit reporting for vulnerability status
• Automated server health monitoring, notification, and problem investigation

IBM Fusion software (Advanced edition only)

The IBM Fusion software is a container-native, hybrid cloud storage platform that offers simplified deployment and data storage management for Kubernetes applications on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Cloud Pak for Applications Advanced has limits on the capabilities of this product; for more information, see IBM Fusion (Advanced edition only).

Components included with Cloud Pak for Applications

IBM Cloud Pak for Applications includes several software components. You can choose to deploy some or all the purchased software. For a list of all software in Cloud Pak for Applications, see Installing.

IBM Transformation Advisor

IBM Transformation Advisor helps you plan, prioritize, and package your on-premises workloads for modernization on Cloud Pak for Applications. IBM Transformation Advisor gathers preferences about your on-premises and wanted cloud environments and then analyzes existing middleware deployments by using a data collector. After you upload the results of the data collector, you can review recommendations for migrating your applications to different cloud platforms and the estimated effort to migrate and modernize. IBM Transformation Advisor also creates necessary deployment artifacts to accelerate your migration into Cloud Pak for Applications.

Learn more in the IBM Transformation Advisor documentation.

IBM Mono2Micro

IBM Mono2Micro an AI-driven feature based on IBM Research technology that accelerates and can take the risk out of refactoring existing applications into modern microservices that are ready for cloud deployments.

Learn more in the IBM Mono2Micro documentation.

WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit

WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit is a set of Eclipse-based tools for WebSphere migration scenarios including cloud migration, WebSphere version to version migration including WebSphere Liberty, and migration from third-party application servers.

Learn more in the WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit documentation.