Ask, find, deploy: Simplifying your IBM Cloud experience

In this post, we’re building on the exciting developments we’ve shared previously with new features and updates that showcase how we’re evolving to meet your needs. Whether you’ve been following along or are reading for the first time, this is your front-row seat to the progress driving IBM Cloud forward.

Let’s continue exploring what’s new and what’s next.

• Simplified experience. We’ve simplified the IBM Cloud platform with an intuitive navigation and catalog experience, making it easier to find the products you need to build your solutions. The latest IBM Cloud Catalog experience offers faster and more accurate results, with matches from within and outside of the catalog visualized on a single page. You can also now discover information about the cloud essential Infrastructure hub without needing to be logged in. Curious to learn what the last release included? Check out the Q4 simplification improvements here.

• AI Assistant. The IBM Cloud AI assistant, which is powered by IBM’s watsonx, is now available with a refactored agentic backend, CLI interaction and Q&A analyzer improvements for backend volume and quality tracking. Sourcing knowledge from our official documentation, the AI assistant can answer any question related to IBM Cloud. Navigate to the IBM Cloud AI assistant by clicking on the “?” in the global header or via the CLI. In the CLI, either local or in the cloudshell interface, the AI assistant can be summoned with the ibmcloud assist command followed by your question. For example, “ibmcloud assist, ‘How do I set up a resource group?" Log in to try the AI assistant today.

Further your Cloud automation solutions that streamline workflows and boost productivity. Get started with deployable architectures and learn how IBM Cloud can help you create secure, compliant and scalable application infrastructures.

• MQ: Published as Cloud automation for MQ in the community catalog, this architecture supports creating and configuring an IBM MQ on Cloud deployment instance and queue manager.
• Db2: Published in the community catalog Cloud Automation for Db2, this architecture supports creating and configuring an IBM DB2 on Cloud service instance.
• EASeJ: Published in the community catalog as Cloud automation for Enterprise Application Service, this architecture supports creating and configuring an instance of Enterprise Application Service for Java to build and deploy applications on the public cloud.

• Cloud Logs and Metrics Routing: Now integrated into the Essential Security & Observability Services stack, replacing Mezmo and Activity Tracker.

• Virtual Network Interfaces: Added support in the VPC landing zone deployable architecture.
• Client to site VPN: Introduced support for secure client-to-site connectivity, this allows remote devices to connect securely to the VPC network using an OpenVPN software client. This feature is particularly useful for telecommuters needing secure access to the IBM Cloud from remote locations such as home offices.

• Maximo Application Suite: Deployable architecture upgraded to Maximo v9.0.

• Access management module: Provisions observability, security, network and compute access groups at the Administrator, Editor and Viewer levels of access.
• Advanced Event Streams module: Implements IBM Event Streams for IBM Cloud with topics, partitions, throughput, storage size, cleanup policy, retention time, retention size, segment size and schema.
• Kibana: Added as an optional configuration add-on to Elasticsearch.

With IBM Cloud’s latest release, you’ll notice enhanced navigation, discovery, and assistance to help you get to your most essential services. We'll be exploring more related in future posts, so be sure to stay tuned for more insights and updates.

Log in or create your IBM Cloud account to get started today.