IBM Uses Kubernetes to Extend Cloud to On-Premises
IBM, at its Think Digital conference this week, made available a technology preview of an instance of the IBM Cloud platform that makes use of Kubernetes to allow it to be deployed in an on-premises IT environment.
Most of the cloud services IBM already provides are based on Kubernetes. IBM is leveraging that software stack to create IBM Cloud Satellite, which will enable IBM to extend the reach of its cloud services into on-premises IT environments to create a hybrid cloud.
Scheduled to be available later this year, IBM Cloud Satellite is based on a local instance of the Red Hat OpenShift platform running on an instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. IBM Cloud Satellite enables teams to define a location populated by a group of RHEL hosts. There is also Satellite Mesh, a federated instance of Istio that can span multiple Kubernetes clusters, and Satellite Link, a tool for automating the administration of application-level firewalls.
Finally, IBM is making available a Satellite Config tool to provide a global view of applications and control over configuration and application deployment, and visibility among applications.
IBM President Jim Whitehurst told conference attendees hybrid clouds are now imperative because in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic no one can predict with certainty where an application workload may need to run next.
By leveraging platforms developed by Red Hat, IT teams can run once and now deploy anywhere, says Whitehurst. That capability provides IT teams with a level of control over their IT environments that goes well beyond simply having a centralized control plane through which they can only observe the chaos that ensues when employing multiple cloud computing platforms, he notes.
Rather than trying to manage multiple clouds based on completely different stacks of software, IBM, in alliance with its Red Hat business unit, is making a case of a common set of software infrastructure that can be deployed on-premises or any public cloud, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). As part of that strategy, Red Hat is also launching a Web App Marketplace through which organizations can find applications that have been certified to run on Red Hat OpenShift.
IBM is taking that concept a step further to extend the reach of the IBM Cloud control plane into an on-premises IT environment, including edge computing platforms. That approach will enable IBM to counter rival approaches to hybrid cloud computing that have been put forward by Google, Microsoft and Oracle.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the transition to hybrid cloud computing might accelerate as IT organizations will be under more pressure to reduce the total cost of IT. One of the most efficient ways to achieve that goal is to centralize the management of multiple cloud computing platforms. The challenge IT organizations will now face is determining the best way to achieve that goal.
