IBM Cloud Pak foundational services

IBM Cloud Pak foundational services version 4.0 marks a significant milestone with numerous enhancements and features that improve the IBM Cloud Pak® platform. It simplifies the deployment, lifecycle management, scope, and content of the services to align with your deployments and topologies.

Foundational services provide seamless integration of operator-based capabilities that provide an integrated and consistent set of user experiences across multiple IBM Cloud Paks and cloud environments. IBM Cloud Paks® and containerized software can leverage foundational services for application modernization and transformation.

Workload isolation

New capability of isolating a cluster based on the line of business (tenants).
Reduced service dependencies.
Isolated installation and upgrade of IBM Cloud Paks in the same shared cluster.
Service isolation and configuration per namespace or tenant for independent IBM Cloud Pak lifecycle management.

target-fs-configuration — Figure 1. Foundational services 4.x.x scoping model

Lowered footprint

Fewer operators to install.
Reduced dependency on other operators.
New Identity Management (IM) component.
Fewer artifacts are deployed with IBM Cloud Paks.
Reduced cost and complexity of evaluations and production deployments.
Reduced operator layering and complexity.

Improved security

Reduced cluster permissions in key foundational services components.
Permissions are scoped to workloads in shared clusters.
Support of topology that provides separation of control (operator) and data (operands) for stronger security and compliance practices.

Flexible deployment

The need for ibm-common-services namespace is eliminated.
IBM Cloud Paks can install foundational services in a namespace of their choice.
Independent upgrade and migration of IBM Cloud Paks to foundational services version 4.0.
Each tenant in the cluster can have a different version of the same service.

fs-transition — Figure 2. Different versions of the same service in a cluster

Improved user experience

Enhanced, consistent, and integrated single-sign-on (SSO) UI for IBM Cloud Paks.
IM for SSO and identity provider mapping.
Integrated UI to facilitate interaction across IBM Cloud Pak components.

Simplified framework

The IBM Automation Framework layer of services is eliminated to ease the complexity of IBM Cloud Pak deployments.
The IBM Automation Flink and IBM Automation Elasticsearch components that were a part of the IBM Automation Framework, can now be installed as individual services along with foundational services.

See the features, improvements, and other updates at What's new in the foundational services installer version 4.x.x.