OVERVIEW

=>IBM Cloud is a combination of Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service

(IaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

=>Users can deploy over 200 services from containers, data and AI, to blockchain and more.

=>IBM Cloud maintains 60 data centers worldwide, enabling local deployment and global scalability.

=>47 Fortune 50 companies trust mission-critical applications on IBM Cloud’s infrastructure.

=>With open-source technologies, such as Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, and compute options
such as virtual machines and bare metal, you have the control and flexibility to support workloads

in the environment of your choice.

=>The IBM Cloud platform is composed of multiple components that work together to provide a

consistent and dependable cloud experience.

The IBM Cloud platform is composed of

1.a robust console that serves as the front end for managing your resources,

2.an identity and access management component for authentication and access control,

3.a catalog consisting hundreds of offerings, and

4.an account and billing management system that provides exact usage for pricing plans.

One of the main ways of accessing IBM Cloud is through the IBM Cloud Console. From the

console you can:

=>read the Docs to learn more about products,

=>use the Catalog to create new resources,

=>access the IBM Cloud resources you have provisioned,

=>use the support tab to open a ticket, and

=>invite new users using the user management tab.

The IBM Cloud command-line interface (CLI) allows you to programmatically interact with

IBM Cloud through a terminal or shell.

The IBM Cloud CLI is supported by Mac, Linux, and Windows,

extendable with plugins, and

available through the Console via the IBM Cloud Shell terminal

To interact with services IBM Cloud provides API’s (Application Programming Interface)

and SDKs (Software Development Kit).

For example, a developer can use the REST APIs to analyze text content, in the programming

language of their choice while SDKs allow a developer to target a specific language.

=>SDKs include support for Python, Node.js, Java, Swift, and other languages depending

on the service.

=>IBM is committed to providing our clients with data privacy, security, and governance

solutions to assist them in their journey to compliance readiness.

=>IBM Cloud is built on best-in-industry security standards, including GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 9001,

PCI, and SOC2.

Here on my dashboard you can see my resource summary, which is the most important pane.

Here you can see the Cloud Foundry services I've deployed, my other services I have deployed,

storage, and developer tools.

You can also see Classic Infrastructure, your recent support cases, and any IBM Cloud status

here as well.

Once you click on catalog, you'll be brought to the IBM Cloud products catalog.

Here you can quickly search for and create an instance of whatever product you may want.

Next, you may want to go into the Docs.

This will show you the documentation for any product you want.

Next, if you click on the support tab, you'll go and be able to raise a ticket, .

Lastly, in your Manage tab, you can see the status of your account and any sort of billing

and usage, and IAM.

Here, we also have the IBM Cloud shell.

And lastly, we have the Cost estimator tool

To get started with the IBM Cloud Shell, click on the icon on the top right.

First, we'll check the version of our IBM Cloud CLI by issuing the command IBM cloud

version. Ibmcloud --version

Next, we'll list all of our service instances on our account by issuing the command

ibmcloud Resource Service-Instance.

Here we see all the instances that are deployed in our account.

Lastly, we will list all of the Kubernetes clusters we have running with the

IBM cloud KS cluster LS

command.
LOCATIONS AND REGIONS

=>IBM Cloud can deploy workloads in over 6 regions, 18 availability zones and 60 data centers

globally.

=>This network spans 19 countries on six continents.

=>The six IBM Cloud regions are Dallas, Washington DC London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and Sydney.

In IBM Cloud there is the concept of a single zone cluster.

=>In a single zone cluster your resources remain in the zone in which the cluster is diploid.

In IBM cloud, there is also the concept of a multi-zone region,

=> a multi-zone region has

three or more data centers within 6 miles of each other.

These data centers are located in close proximity to ensure high availability and resiliency.

IBM cloud compute services are available in all six multi-zone capable regions and select

single zone regions.

=>These include cities in North America, West, North America, South North America, East,

South America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Locations can be further broken down as follows.

A geography is an organizational grouping based on a continent.

Countries are locations within a geography.

Metros are cities where data centers are located.

Lastly, we have a data center.

The physical location of the compute network and storage infrastructure that hosts cloud

services and applications.

=>IBM Cloud provides cloud infrastructure in Ashburn, VA and Dallas, TX that are built

to meet Fedramp and FISMA privacy and security standards and are connected to each other

through an independent high-speed private network.

These availability zones are also available for virtual servers and for bare metal servers

as well. And many of our IBM cloud services such as cloud object storage and cloud database

are using multi-zone availability to make sure that your data is up there and as available

as possible.
In this lesson, we learned that IBM cloud is available in 60 datacenters across 19 countries

and has multi-zone regions in the North and South America, Europe, and Asia.

ACCOUNT TYPES AND SUPPORT PLAN

---------------------------------------------------------

3 main types of account & 3 types of support plan

Types of account

-It has Lite accounts which are free of charge.

-Pay-as-You-Go accounts which allow you to access all IBM Cloud services and

-Subscriptionaccounts which are available for enterprise customers.

=>A lite account is ideal for users who want to explore IBM Cloud for free.

Benefits of a lite account are access to over 40 services like cloud object storage, cloud

databases, and AI services.

No credit card required, and the account never expires.

=>A Pay-as-You-Go account is ideal for users who want full access to IBM Cloud with no

long-term commitment.

Benefits of a Pay-as-You-Go account are access to all services in the catalog, access to

basic support, and it is fit for production use cases.

=>A subscription account is ideal for organizations that would benefit from predicted billing

and have committed to a certain amount of spend.

A subscription account offers discounted pricing for services and support, is available for

enterprises and like, the Pay-as-You-Go account, gives access to all services in the catalog.

3 SUPPORT LEVELS

=>Basic, which has access to create cases or tickets and can talk with support via phone

or chat

=>Advanced, which guarantees a response time of 1 to 8 hours Based on the severity of your ticket
and

=> premium, which guarantees a response time of 15 minutes to two hours.

And a technical account manager is assigned to your account for quarterly reviews.

BILLING & USAGE

-----------------------

Billing and usage enables you to view detailed information about your IBM Cloud spending.

You can view billing by getting a monthly overview or you can view it by specific service,
and you can also export your usage as a CSV file.

COST ESTIMATOR TOOL

It estimates the cost of an IBM Cloud service before you create the service.

The tool is supported by all IBM Cloud services ranging from AI Services to infrastructure

services and Kubernetes clusters.

You can download your estimate as a PDF and you can calculate your estimate in over 15

currencies, ranging from the US dollar to the South African Rands to the Japanese yen.

IAM

In IBM Cloud, IAM is comprised of four concepts:

1.2Users.

These are the people that log in and use the account.

.Access groups.

This is a way of grouping users together.

3.Resources. A provision service offering selected from the catalog.

4.And resource groups.-a way of grouping resources together.

=>At the very highest level of IAM in IBM Cloud, we have an account.

An account is comprised of many users.

Each user has an email address that they use to log into IBM Cloud with.

In each account there is an account owner.

In practice, for most enterprises this is usually a shared enterprise email that multiple

people can access should someone leave their job.

Services vs resources

A service is an entry from the IBM Cloud catalog, like a virtual machine or object storage or

one of the many other offerings.

A resource is an instance of a service.

For example, in the IBM Cloud catalog, there's a database service called Cloudant.

We can provision two instances of this service and called them DB-Dev and DV-prod.

These would be our resources.

Users

A user represents an IBM ID enabled account.

Users are invited to join accounts which can be done through the console, IBM Cloud CLI

or API.

Users can create API keys to use with the CLI as an alternative to passwords for authentication.

Users are given a role for the platform when invited, and these roles range from read-only

viewer role to the administrator role, which can invite other users and view billing information.

Access Groups

Access groups are a collection of users.

For instance, you may decide to group your users into access groups such as admins, billing,

and basic users.

Access groups help enable a cleaner separation of control, and it's worth noting that users

can be part of multiple access groups at the same time.

Resources

a resource is an instance of a service.

Resources have an automatically generated service ID, and they can be deployed to specific

regions.

Resources have roles that can limit user access for that resource.

For example, with cloud object storage, a user with the reader role could list and download

objects in buckets.

A user with a writer role could create and destroy buckets and a user with a manager

role could control all aspects of data storage, like adding a retention policy and bucket

firewall.

Resource Groups

Resource groups are a collection of IBM Cloud resources.

By grouping resources together, you can more easily provide access to multiple resources

at once.

Resource groups are specified at service creation time.

A resource’s resource group cannot be changed.

Resource groups have no geographical restrictions.

This means you can put resources from Dallas and resources from Sydney in the same group,

bringing it all together is the concept of an access policy.

An access policy is the combination of

-a subject, which is a user or an access group.

-Their role.

-And a target, a resource or resource group.

To login using apikey

Ibmcloud login –apikey “key”

Module 2

Infrastructure services available on ibm cloud—compute,storage and metworking

VARIOUS COMPUTE OPTIONS

VIRTUAL SERVERS

=>This is your usual virtual machine type service that offers a range of operating system and

configurable RAM and processing power to fit your use case.

=>Next, is the bare metal service.

This service provides you the raw horsepower that you need for processing intensive and

disk IO intensive workloads.

=>Next, is the power system service.

This service, as its name implies, allows you to spin up power system servers with operating

systems such as AIX and IBM I.

=>Lastly, we have the hyper protect service. This service allows you to run virtual servers on IBM
Linux 1.

You get access to Z technology without having to purchase any unique hardware.

VIRTUAL MACHINE

Virtual servers can be deployed in any IBM data center around the world.

This includes regions such as North America East, West, and South.

The APAC Region, Europe, and South America.

There are different types of virtual servers.

Public servers or multi-tenant in are billed hourly or monthly.

Dedicated servers are like public servers but they're single tenant.

No noisy neighbors, so a little bit more expensive transient servers are the least expensive

option, but our D provisioned as capacity grows.

Lastly, we have reserved servers.

These are committed to a one- or three-year contract.

Let's move on to images. You can choose between different images such as CentOS, Debian,
Microsoft

Red Hat, and Ubuntu.

Each with different versions of operating systems for each image.

It's worth noting a few more aspects of the different virtual server options depending

on the profile you select.

The virtual machine could have up to 64 V CPU and 512 gigabytes of ram.

You can choose to upgrade to a 1 gigabyte per second network connection, and you can

even include five SAN volumes.

And two GPUs that are based on NVIDIA Tesla P-100's.

BARE METAL SERVICES

Bare metal servers like the virtual server counterpart can be provisioned in any IBM

data center around the world.

The service has multiple billing options ranging from hourly, monthly to a one-year and three-year

contract depending on the bare metal service you select.

The images are where things start to change.

Much like the virtual server option, you can choose the images that are on there.

Or you can choose more bare metal specific images like VMware, Citrix or Cloud Linux.

You can even include no operating system.

It's worth noting a few other things about the bare metal service.

We offer both VM Ware and SAP certified bare metal servers.

You can customize your server greatly.

You can go from 4 cores to 72 core.

You can go up to 6 terabytes of Ram, an up to 36 drives.

Lastly, there's GPU support, which is again based off the NVIDIA Tesla P-100 cards.

POWER SYSTEM SERVERS

They're used to deliver flexibel compute capacity for power system workloads.

They can be deployed to specific data centers in Frankfurt, London, Toronto, Washington

and Dallas.

You can choose between the E 880 an S 922 machines and you can choose from various AIX
and IBM I images or bring your own.

HYPER PROTECT(Z)

These can be deployed to specific data centers in Dallas, Frankfurt, Sydney, and Washington.

A few other things to note about the hyper protect server.

Allows you to create an run virtual servers on IBM Linux one, the industry's most secure

Linux based platform.

They offer added security as these servers deployed in any secure service container.

They're easy to configure and deploy as any other virtual machine, and there are no Z

skills or hardware required.

Comparison

Unsurprisingly, the virtual server option is the cheapest.

In terms of performance, the power systems an bare metal, had the most to offer and in

terms of security, it's hard to beat the Linux one offering up.

STORAGE

BLOCK AND FILE STORAGE

There are three types of block and file storage related services on IBM Cloud.

The first is the block storage service.

This provides virtual servers and bare metal servers with a SAN-like iSCSI storage.

Next is the file storage service.

This provides virtual servers and bare metal servers with an NFS based storage.

Last is the cloud backup service.

This is an enterprise level backup storage and disaster recovery solution.

WHAT DO BLOCK AND FILE HAVE IN COMMON?

Both are managed through the console or CLI.

You can authorize a server and mount the volume.

They are highly durable and resilient.

No need to create raid arrays.

Sizes range from 20 gigabytes to 12 Terabytes and can be increased after Provisioning.

Data is protected as encryption at rest, is available at no additional charge.

The number of IOPS, input output operations per second, can be adjusted on the fly.

It can go up to 48,000.

Block and file storage volumes can be provisioned in any IBM Cloud data center around the world.

And also, you're able to create snapshots manually or schedule them in advance.

DIFFERENCE

Block storage can only be attached to one host at a time, whereas file storage can be

attached to many.

You'll likely use block storage for high intensity workloads like a database, whereas file storage

is ideal for workloads that do not require fast connectivity to storage.

CLOUD BACKUP

It's used to backup and restore data between servers in one or more IBM cloud data centers.

There are several benefits to using cloud backup.

Let's highlight a few.

The first is it's very customizable.

You can choose to backup daily, weekly, or on a custom schedule.

You can even target full systems, specific directories or even individual files.

Next, is the management portal.

It's a browser-based portal, allows you to schedule jobs, set retention policy, and perform

one click restores.

Next, there are multiple plugins available for Ms SQL, Ms SharePoint and Oracle.

Next, it offers end to end data encryption.

Data is protected at source in transit and to the destination vaults with 256 bit private

key encryption.

Lastly, there's also Geo Redundancy.

You can protect your data across geographically dispersed sources.

OBJECT STORAGE

Object storage is great for storing vast amounts of unstructured data.

Files are uploaded as objects and saved into buckets.

Within a bucket, there is no directory or tree structure.

When an object is placed in a bucket, it is given a unique identifier.

It has some metadata, like when the data was uploaded or last accessed.

Now let's take a look at IBM Clouds object storage service and some of the benefits that

it offers.

For starters, it has access management control.

You can set policies on who can access and modify objects via IBM Clouds IAM settings.

Next, it provides encryption.

All objects stored in IBM Cloud object storage.

Are encrypted by default.

Additionally, you can encrypt the data using your own keys with IBM key protect.

Next, is SQL query support.

You can run SQL queries against objects stored in buckets.

After that we have high speed transfer.

You can leverage esparra to upload data quickly and finally we have the SDK's and API's.

Objects can be accessed via an S3 compatible rest API or with an SDK that is written for

many popular programming languages.

IBM Cloud's object storage service offers different levels of resiliency.

Let's compare them and see how they fit.

The cross region option for your instance means that your data is stored across three

regions within a geography.

This will offer you the highest possible availability, but at the lowest performance level.

The regional choice is a great blend of availability, performance, and service integration.

It's less available than cross region but is higher performance and when more integration

with other services.

The single data centers choice is 1.

Your data is stored across multiple devices in a single data center.

This is recommended when keeping your data in country is a top priority.

There are four different tiers of storage class for IBM Cloud object storage.

Let's compare them.

If you're not sure where to start, the smart tier is the option for you.

It will automatically give you the lowest storage rate based on your monthly activity.
The standard storage class is great when your data needs to be accessed frequently.

It is a higher cost per GB, but as higher performance.

The vault storage class is ideal for data which needs to be accessed once a month or

less.

This is cheaper than the standard storage class, but a bit more expensive than the cold

vault option.

The cold vault option is usually used for archives where data is only accessed a few

times per year.

NETWORKING SERVICES

IBM Cloud has two different services for networking.

The first is called Cloud Internet services.

This service is based on Cloudflare.

The second is a collection of networking infrastructure services with options for Vlans, VPNs, and

CDN's.

CLOUD INTERNET SERVICES

The cloud Internet services provide reliable, secure options for Internet facing applications

by leveraging Cloudflare.

Cloudflare, if you're not familiar, is a web infrastructure company that provides DNS services

to 12 million websites and has over 165 points of presence all over the world.

Within IBM Cloud you can use cloud Internet services to configure the following:

Domain name server for host name resolution.

Transport layer security to secure data.

Global load balancer to reduce latency and increase availability by routing traffic based

on server availability and health.

Rate limiting, which automatically identifies and mitigates excessive request rates.

DDoS protection, a scalable configurable service that protects against brute force attacks.

Smart routing, which ensures content is delivered on the fastest path from end user to application.

Web application firewall, a layered defense to protect data against sophisticated attackers

and malicious bots

and caching, which reduces latency and improves performance.

NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES
------------------------------------------------------

There are many networking related services on IBM Cloud.

We're going to do a deep dive on direct link, CDN, and load balancer.

Before we get into that, let's summarize a few of the other services.

The Gateway appliance enables you to create virtual routers, firewalls and private networking

devices.

You can choose between a Juniper or AT&T based appliance.

There are both hardware and software-based firewalls.

These will prevent malicious activity, helping to ensure uptime of your server.

You can add a firewall to a specific virtual server.

Next are VPNs.

VPNs facilitate connectivity from your network to IBM's private network.

Subnets and IPS subnets provide additional IP addresses for virtual machines.

There are managed independently of virtual machine resources and are available until

cancelled.

Lastly, we have virtual local area networks or VlANs.

AV line is used to provide packet identification and to let multiple workloads coexist on the

same physical equipment.

Depending on your situation, you may never need to interact with VLANss directly because

they are managed automatically.

DIRECT LINK

Direct link creates a direct private connection between remote networks and IBM Cloud.

With direct link you have a secure dedicated connectivity.

It gives you private access to IBM Cloud infrastructure.

It offers a fully integrated hybrid environment.

Whether your resources are in a data center or on IBM Cloud, direct link is perfect for

creating multi cloud connectivity in a single environment.

And lastly we have speed.

With direct link you can choose between speeds of 5100, 500 megabits per second or even up

to five gigabits per second as your needs change.

You can transition your speed seamlessly.

CDN

IBM Cloud also provides a CDN service.

A CDN is a highly distributed platform of servers to help minimize delays.

A few things to note about IBM Cloud's CDN service.

First off, it's based off Akamai, a best of breed

CDN provider to create one of the world's

fastest and most reliable content delivery networks.

Second, smarter scaling automatically scale your service globally to over 2200 points

of presence in 36 countries.

Using a CDN also makes things more secure as now you have a new layer between yourself

and infrastructure attacks.

You can use it to optimize dynamic content.

You can direct customer requests.

Through optimized routes, proactively fetching content from origin and large file compression.

Lastly, there is usage-based pricing.

Pay for what you use with no minimum monthly fee.

LOAD BALANCER

the load balancer, which is used to distribute traffic

among to your virtual servers.

You can choose between an IBM Cloud load balancer or a Citrix Netscaler VPX load balancer.

Elastic load balancers allow for layer four and layer seven load balancing.

This includes HTTP, HTTPS, NTCP, Public and private load balancing, server health checks,

SSL offload, and monitoring metrics.

VIRTUAL PRIVATE CLOUD

A virtual private cloud is a secure, isolated private cloud hosted within a public cloud.

It gives you the security of a private cloud with the cost effectiveness and scalability

of a public cloud.

It offers an on-demand configurable pool of shared resources allocated within a public

cloud environment.

There is isolation between users achieved through private IP subnets and encrypted communication

channels.

In a virtual private cloud, there is a function which authenticates users and provides remote

access to the shared resources.

This is essentially allowing organizations to work on a virtually private cloud, hence

the name.

Virtual private clouds provide the necessary infrastructure in isolation as a fully automated

solution.

Let's explore how VPC's provide customizable networking, security, and private access to

data and storage.

VPC's allow you to create multiple virtual private clouds in multi zone regions,

create subnets in different zones, each region has multiple zones.

Security groups which are created to filter each network interface by a virtual server

based on IP address.

You can create virtual server instances quickly using predefined profiles optimized for your

specific workloads.

You can use a public gateway to enable communication to the Internet for all virtual server instances

on the attached subnet.

You can also add block storage to your virtual private cloud instance by default, a 100 Gigabyte

General purpose block storage volume is created automatically.

Let's take a look at a sample architecture for an IBM virtual private cloud.
First, when the user connects to the Internet and goes to a specific URL, they will need

to authenticate to the network.

This is the first blue box around our architecture.

This will give them a certain predefined access to the network.

We can see that the VPC Network which is deployed in a specific zone within a region where there

are storage, virtual server instances, gateways and load balancers are also hosted

The VPC network has access to many cloud services such as AI, databases, IoT and Container
Registry.

The network also has access to DevOps services including monitoring, log analysis, and continuous
delivery.

With generation one, it is available in all six regions you have up to 16 gigabytes per

second networking. With generation two

it's available in five regions and you can get networking speeds of up to 80 gigabytes

per second.

Currently there is only support for provider managed security .

VMware

So why use VMware on cloud?

Well, in the early 2000s, before we really had any major public clouds, VMware Solutions
became the standard for desktop and server virtualization.

Many companies were using VMware to virtualize their workloads.

VMware software was deployed to servers and data centers all over the world.

In fact, many IBM clients were using VMware or still using VMware to this day.

In 2016, IBM Cloud became the first cloud vendor to bring VMware services to the cloud.

So, let's go back to our original question.

Why is VMware on a cloud platform?

Why migrate workloads?

The 1st and biggest reason is to bring cloud economies to VMware workloads.

You can expect far less spending on capital expenditures.

This includes things like purchasing equipment, data centers, so forth.

All of this is managed by the cloud provider.

Linked into this is scalability inelasticity.

If you need more capacity, you order it.

You can scale it up and down as you need.

And the last point is high availability.

By using a cloud provider, you ensure your workloads can take advantage of the underlying

highly available networking between regions of a cloud.

IBM Cloud offers two VMware based services.

The first is VMware solutions dedicated.

This is a single tenant bare metal solution that has options for vCenter Server and VMware

vSphere.

This service allows you to retain root level access to the hypervisor, giving you a similar

experience as you would have on premises in a data center.

The second is VMware Solutions shared.

This is a multi-tenant solution that uses shared infrastructure and provides a VMware

environment based on Vcloud director.

The VM ware solutions dedicated service is a bare metal solution with vCenter and vSphere

options.

With the dedicated solution, the customer still has root access down to the hypervisor

level.
The V center option is a fully automated, standardized software defined data center.

Networking, storage and add ONS can be automatically configured at install time.

The vSphere option allows for more customization for networking, storage and add ons.

But it's typically a manual configuration.

Both solutions provide the option to purchase IBM provided licenses or to bring your own

license.

You can also deploy add on services to a new or existing instance.

This includes security and compliance services like big IP and business continuity and migration

services like Veeam and Zerto.

On the other hand, we have VMware Solutions shared.

This allows you to deploy workloads on top of IBM hosted VMware infrastructure.

IBM provides a self-service on-demand VMware cloud computing platform with VMware vCloud

Director running on IBM Cloud.

With the shared solution IBM manages up to the hypervisor level.

It's very cost effective.

You only pay for what you use, and you can start small as small as one V CPU and 1 Gigabyte

of ram and expand when you're ready.

The shared option is perfect for temporary migration and burst scenarios.

Linked into this is disaster recovery.

Veeam services enable an economical landing zone for disaster recovery workloads.

Lastly, self-service, the shared service interface was designed to get you productive from day

one.

You can get up and running within minutes.

So why use VMware on IBM Cloud?

IBM Cloud has several unique advantages.

The first is security, which is provided via encryption and access control.

IBM provides the highest level of encryption for data at rest and data in motion with FIPS

142 Level 4 based encryption.

Next is compliance.

We can comply with data sovereignty regulations and sharing.

We provide geofencing for your workloads.

Expertise.

IBM is one of the world's largest operators of VM Ware workloads.

With over 15 years of experience, we've managed over 850,000 workloads and have migrated over

100,000 workloads from on Prem to the cloud.

This is across many different industry verticals, from government to banking to retail.

The last one I'll mention is rapid setup.

IBM Cloud's automation can quickly get your VM Ware deployment up and running in hours,

not days or weeks.

At the time of this video, there are 13 optional services you can add to your VM Ware deployment.

These range from security and compliance to business continuity and migration type services.

I've picked three to talk about at a high level.

First, we're going to talk about Veeam.

It allows you to backup and replicate virtual machines on VM Ware easily.

Next is Zerto, which assists with creating and managing disaster recovery with VMware.

And lastly, we have the F5 Big IP Suite of products.

These help in networking and security related tools for your VMware solution.

It covers things like load balancing, firewalls, DNS and more.

CONTAINERS AND KUBERNETES

CONTAINERS

A container can be thought of a packaging up your application source code dependencies,

like runtimes, binaries, libraries, and data.

Packaged up container is called an image.

Images are stored in what is called a registry.

You'll see terms like images, image registry, a lot when talking about containers.

Before we get into the why, let's talk about the history.

The term container may be new, but the concept of isolating processes has been around since

the 80s.

With freebsd jails in the 2000s being a popular example.

The open source project docker made containers an industry standard with simple developer

tools that work on both Linux and windows.

Since then, there have been multiple container runtimes like PodMan, Cryo and container D

There are many, many more.

The container ecosystem has moved to adopting specifications from the open container initiative

or OCI.

Last up, we have image registries.

These can be both private and public, will be getting to that a little bit more later.

So why use container?

There are many reasons why.

Here are a few, the first being that it's portable.

You can run them anywhere.

Containers are abstracted away from the host operating system, making them portable.

They can run uniformly and consistently across any platform or cloud.

Next is speed and efficiency.

Containers share the host operating system kernel and are not bogged down with extra

overhead.

This means you'll have faster startup times as your containers are inherently smaller

in capacity compared to VMs.

The last reason is security and isolation.

Containers inherently prevent the invasion of malicious code from affecting other containers

in the host operating system.

Additionally, security permissions can be defined to block unwanted components from

entering containers or limit communication with unnecessary resources.

KUBERNETES

Kubernetes is an open source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, or

CNCF.

It's around six years old, has thousands of commits, and is a vibrant, well-supported

open source.

Ecosystem with many vendors contributing to the project.

There are over 150 certified Kubernetes providers on the market today.

The goal of Kubernetes is to make everything associated with deploying and managing your

containers easier and has automated rollouts and rollbacks.

Kubernetes will automatically scale your services up or down based off of Utilization.

Ensuring you're only running what you need when you need it.

It will monitor the health of your services to prevent bad roll outs before things go

bad.

They will also continuously run health checks against your services.

Restarting containers that fail.

Most importantly, Kubernetes is built to be used anywhere, allowing you to orchestrate

deployments to public clouds, private clouds, on premise or hybrid deployments.

We're going to quickly talk about her Kubernetes works at a very high level.

The main way a System Administrator would interact with Kubernetes is through the kubectl

CLI.

It's configured to talk to a specific Kubernetes cluster.

Each cluster will have a master node and at least one worker node.

Each worker node can support running multiple pods.

Each pod is intern running an image of a containerized application.

IBM Cloud offers a fully managed Kubernetes service in a matter of minutes.

You can spin up your own Kubernetes cluster, have access to worker nodes and start deploying

applications.

IBM Cloud's Kubernetes service has many benefits.

One, it's fully managed and provides automatic upgrades.

Two, it’s secure.

The IBM Cloud Kubernetes service has broad industry compliance including PCI ,HIPAA,

SOC1, and more.

Three, you can configure your cluster as a single or multi zone cluster.

Next, are these supported add ons.

In just a few clicks you can install a service mesh or serverless add onto your cluster.

Lastly, there's logging and monitoring.

You can monitor and troubleshoot, define alerts, design custom dashboards, and more.

Let's dive a little deeper on the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service.

The IBM Cloud community service can be deployed to any of the six regions on IBM Cloud.

This includes North America, East, West, South, the APAC Region, Europe and South America.
There are different ways to deploy IBM Cloud Kubernetes service.

The first is on a virtual shared instance.

This provision IKS on virtual machines.

Next is a virtual dedicated instance which is going to provide your Kubernetes cluster

on a dedicated server.

Recall that this is a single tenant instance, and lastly, you can provision your Kubernetes

cluster on bare metal.

Each type of deployment has multiple profiles.

Ranging from 2 vCPU to 512 gigabytes of Ram.

The billing is hourly, monthly or at the time of this recording there is even a free option.

There are two other services worth mentioning when talking about IBM Cloud's Kubernetes

service.

The first is the container registry.

This is used to store container images in a fully managed multi-tenant registry.

It's highly available as the service is hosted and managed by IBM Cloud.

You can configure your images to be privately accessed by other users in your IBM Cloud

account shareable with API keys or even make them publicly available.

Images in the container registry will also be scanned by the vulnerability advisor tool.

The helm catalog is also unique to IBM Cloud.

And allows users to use helm to install and upgrade complex Kubernetes applications in

a cluster.

The helm catalog in IBM Cloud has access to IBM products, popular open source products,

like Jenkins and Tecton, and supports multiple architectures like X86 power NZ.

So how does the IBM Kubernetes service work?

How would you interact with it at a high level it would look like this.

You first start off by logging into your IBM Cloud account.

You select a region, you select a resource group, then you list or push images into a

container registry with the IBM Cloud CR images command.

You can list or create new Kubernetes clusters with the IBM Cloud KS command, and you can

interact with your Kubernetes cluster with the kubectl Command.

OPENSHIFT

OpenShift is based on the open source OKD Project.

OKD is the community distribution of Kubernetes that Powers OpenShift.

You can start with that for free today.

OpenShift is a layer that's built on top of Kubernetes.

It makes working with it much easier.

OpenShift makes a lot of the difficult tasks like deploying applications and doing day-to-day

administrative operations easier by extending Kubernetes in an opinionated way.

OpenShift like Kubernetes is also deployable on premises or in a cloud and with the exception

of OKD, OpenShift benefits from enhanced security from being run on RHEL.

So how does OpenShift extend Kubernetes?

The first is it provides an integrated Container Registry.

It has a powerful integrated console that improve the experience for developers and

operators.

OpenShift takes the Kubernetes namespace concept and extends it with projects, allowing you

to control access between who can access namespaces or projects.

OpenShift greatly simplifies developer workflow with source to image and routes.

Lastly, system administrators can use built-in monitoring tools like Grafana and Prometheus.

IBM Cloud offers a highly available, fully managed OpenShift offering.

In a matter of minutes, you can spin up your own OpenShift cluster and start deploying
applications, allowing developers to focus on creating applications, not managing infrastructure.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud has many other benefits

It has automated upgrades and patching.

It's secure.

Like its Kubernetes counterpart, has broad industry compliance, including HIPAA, PCI,

and SOC1, and more.

You can configure cluster as a single or multi zone cluster.

There's integration with LogDNA insisting and at the time of this recording there are

multiple versions available.

You can deploy a 3.11 instance or there are multiple 4.0 versions.

Just like its Kubernetes counterpart, the managed OpenShift service on IBM Cloud has

the same regions: North America, South America, APAC in Europe.

The same deployment platforms: virtual shared, dedicated or bare metal.

The same profiles starting at 2 vCPU and going up to 512 gigabytes of RAM.

The only difference here is that there is no free tier option.

Your billing options are hourly or monthly.

We mentioned OpenShift 4 a few minutes ago.

OpenShift 4 is the best enterprise platform for building production ready applications

today and for the decade ahead.

OpenShift 4 brought in many new features.

The operator framework.

OpenShift 4 was re-architected around operators.

Operators enable developers to Automate the management of components like databases in

a consistent, repeatable, scalable way.

The OpenShift Service Mesh

OpenShift 4 saw the inclusion of OpenShift Service Mesh, which is based on STO.

With Red Hat on IBM Cloud, you can install a Service Mesh on your cluster in just a few

clicks.

OpenShift Serverless Computing

OpenShift 4 saw the inclusion of OpenShift Serverless Computing, which is based on K

native
Just like the server mesh component, you can install a Service Mesh on your cluster in

just a few clicks.

OpenShift pipelines cloud native CI CD pipelines were introduced in OpenShift 4.1

These are based on detect an open source project and code ready workspaces built on the Eclipse

Che Open Source Project.

Red Hat Code ready workspaces uses Kubernetes and containers to provide a user with a consistent

and secure development environment.

With OpenShift’s rise in popularity, it has become available in many different platforms.

IBM based platforms such as IBM Cloud as well as IBM Z and Power.

Other major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP also provide OpenShift.

You can deploy OpenShift to Red Hat OpenStack or virtualization platforms.

You can also deploy to VMware vSphere or on another bare metal server.

Two things to point out code ready containers will spin up a minimal cluster on a local

machine, which is ideal for a dev and test purposes.

And the OpenShift playground is available online with no sign up required.

It's great for experimenting, but only available for 60 minutes up next.

CLOUD FOUNDRY

Cloud Foundry is an example of a Platform as a Service offering or PaaS.

With Paas offerings, such as Cloud Foundry, you don't have to worry about the underlying
infrastructure.

Like runtimes, operating systems or servers.

It enables you to focus exclusively on your application, code and data.

Another major benefit of using the PaaS model is that deploying applications and services

is typically a matter of minutes, not hours or days.

So, what is Cloud Foundry?

First off, it's open source.

Cloud Foundry is an open source project that had its initial release in 2011.

In 2015, the project was transferred to the newly created Cloud Foundry Foundation.

The source code for Cloud Foundry is under an Apache license.

Deployment automation.

Cloud Foundry has a container-based architecture that runs apps in any programming language.

You can deploy apps to Cloud Foundry using existing tools with zero modification to the

code.

Flexible infrastructure.

By decoupling applications from infrastructure, you can make individual decisions about where

to host workloads on premise, in public clouds or in managed infrastructure.

Commercial options.

Cloud Foundry is container-based architecture runs apps in the most popular programming

languages.

An on the choice of your cloud infrastructure.

IBM Cloud, AWS, Azure, GCP and more.

Lastly, we have community support.

A broad community contributes to and supports Cloud Foundry.

Over 3,500 contributors 12,000 Slack participants and 850 meetups worldwide.

Currently, when you deploy with Cloud Foundry on IBM Cloud, you'll get a fully managed multi-
tenant

environment.

There are three ways to deploy your Cloud Foundry application on IBM Cloud.

The first is to add a toolchain that includes the IBM Cloud continuous delivery service

to your application.
Alternatively, you can deploy from the application level console.

You can view logs, setup environment variables, raise and lower the instances memory, and

even scale your application by creating multiple instances.

Lastly, you'll be able to bind to other IBM services automatically.

Runtimes link IBM Cloud services to applications as endpoints, giving any instance of an application

embedded knowledge of how to manage relevant calls and data.

There are many benefits to using Cloud Foundry on IBM Cloud.

These include access control.

You can set up fine grain assignment of compute capacity to development teams with IBM Cloud

IAM policies.

Health management.

Applications that are crashing will automatically try to restart.

Automatic routing.

Publicly reachable URLs are automatically created for your applications.

It's also Lite tier compatible.

No credit card required.

The Lite tier limit has a memory of 256 megabytes of application runtime.

This is good enough for most weekend projects.

There are many Cloud Foundry runtimes that are supported on IBM Cloud.

This includes Java, node.js, Python, Go, Swift, PHP.net, Tomcat ,and Ruby.

CLOUD FUNCTIONS

Serverless computing refers to the concept of building and running applications that

well, do not require server management.

It describes a finer grade deployment model where applications bundled as one or more

functions are uploaded to a platform and then executed, scaled, and built in one response

to the exact demand needed at the moment.

With serverless technology, you pay only for code execution.

This means that you will be able to see considerable cost savings relative to other technologies,like

VM's or containers which are likely not being used 100% of the time.

Throughout the course, we've explored several different deployment platforms to run your
workloads.

We started with bare metal virtual servers, made our way to containers, and now we're

at PaaS and Serverless.

Cloud functions are a Functions as a Service offering that enable developers to build serverless

applications.

The developer only has to focus on their application.

This can further simplify the process of deploying code into production.

IBM Cloud functions is a Functions as a Service programming platform based on the open source

project Apache OpenWhisk.

It has an integrated API gateway.

An API gateway is a component of cloud functions to expose API's.

It comes with security, oauth support, rate limiting and custom domain support.

IBM Cloud functions also supports open API, previously known as swagger.

Cloud functions have built in integrations with other IBM Cloud services such as AI,

databases, object storage.

It also has support for external providers such as GitHub and GitLab.

IBM Cloud functions offer up to 5 million free executions per month.

And lastly, there is logging in monitoring through the IBM Cloud Console.

When talking about cloud functions, we have to talk about actions, triggers, and sequences.

Actions are the building blocks of your serverless architecture.

They contain the code performing the work and can be invoked via a rest API or trigger.

Triggers receive events from outside IBM Cloud functions and invoke all connected actions.

A webhook for a GitHub repository would be an example of a trigger.

Sequences invoke multiple actions in linear order.

This makes it possible to pass parameters from one function to the next.

There are several common use cases in Serverless Architectures, let's go over some of them

Serverless APIs.

You can expose application logic by implementing serverless microservices.

Map your functions to well defined API endpoints that a user can call by making use of the

API gateway integration.

ETL workloads.
Execute code whenever data is updated in a data store.

This can be data at rest, like in a database or data in motion, such as a message queue

or streaming data.

The last one is alarm driven.

You can execute your functions periodically.

Think like a batch job or a Cron job.

Periodic intervals so that they can run every few hours or at a specific time or date, either

one time or repeatedly.

Cloud functions on IBM Cloud support many different runtimes.

You have the option of choosing from Java, Node, Python, Go, Swift, PHP, Ruby or any

other language or framework by leveraging containers.

Module 4

Databases

A database is an organized collection of data stored on a computer.

Traditionally, this was done via rows and columns as commonly seen in the relational

or SQL database.

Now, databases have evolved into storing information in ways that do not depend on SQL which are

commonly referred to as NoSQL.

Databases are used for a variety of use cases, ranging from storing personal or employee

information, transaction history or customer data.

You'll see them in just about any application you're using.

There are many types of databases, so we'll cover three types as they relate to services

available on IBM Cloud.

First, we have a relational database, which is an example of a SQL database.

A relational database is a collection of data organized into a table structure, organized

into rows and columns.

Structured query language, SQL is typically the standard programming language used to

update and query the database.

Relational databases are also great for asset compliance and high transaction applications

such as online transaction processing.

Next, we have document databases.

There an example of a non-SQL database document.

Databases have flexible schemas.

They're best suited to store semi structured data and it can handle dynamic querying.

Some common use cases for document stores include customer data, user generated content,

and order data.

Lastly, we have a key value database.

Another example of a non-SQL database.

A key value database is a non-relational database that stores data as a collection of key value

pairs in which a key serves as a unique identifier.

Common use cases for these types of databases are leaderboards, caches, and shopping cart

data

Database as a service is a cloud computing service that lets users access and use a cloud

database system without purchasing and setting up their own hardware, installing their own

database software, or managing the database themselves.

Database as a service or DBaaS offers your organization significant financial, operational

and strategic benefits.

First, we have simpler, less costly management.

With database as a service,the cloud provider manages everything.

Although you can choose to manage certain aspects yourself if you wish.

Scalability, you can quickly and easily provision additional storage and computing capacity

at runtime if you need it, and you can scale down your database cluster during non-peak

usage times to save cost.

And you have rapid development and faster time to market.

With DBaaS, developers can help themselves to database capabilities and spin up and configure

a database that's ready to integrate with their application in minutes.

IBM Cloud has a few different options in terms of relational databases.

Db2, a fully hosted, highly performant relational data store running the enterprise class Db2

database engine.

We also have Db2 hosted which lets you run Db2 with full administrative access on cloud

infrastructure.
Then we have my SQL, one of the most popular databases.

It is free an under the GNU General Public License and also Postgres.

Postgres is an open source object relational database with over 30 years of history.

Next, let's talk a little bit about document databases on IBM Cloud.

First, we have MongoDB, which is the most popular document database and is available

as a managed service on IBM Cloud.

It features a flexible data model, high availability, automated backup orchestration, auto scaling

and coupled allocation of storage RAM, and vCPUs and is HIPAA compliant.

Next, we have clouded, which is IBM's database as a service based on Apache's CouchDB.

It has a 99.99% service level agreement.

Next, we have Elasticsearch which is IBM Cloud's enterprise-ready fully managed solution for

JSON document indexing and full text search capabilities.

Next, we'll talk about the key value databases on IBM Cloud.

We have two options for that.

First is Reddis, which is an open source in memory data structure store, used as a database,

cache, and message broker.

Next, we have etcd, which is an object relational database management system with an emphasis

on extensibility and on standards compliance.

INTEGRATION
------------------

Integration provides connectivity, routing, and transformation for different services.

It enables sharing of data, connecting applications, and security.

IBM Cloud has several services that enable integration, each of which have a free or

Lite tier plan.

API connect which provides API creation and management with security rich features and

centralized governance.

App connect which allows you to connect your applications, automate tasks with hundreds

of built-in connectors.

Event streams, which is a high throughput message bus built with Apache Kafka.

MQ which provides enterprise grade messaging.

Let's take a look at each in more detail.

API connect is a comprehensive end to end API lifecycle solution that enables the automated

creation of APIs.

It also has other features to assist in API lifecycle management, such as being able to

rapidly generate swagger compliant API's from back end data sources,

graphically assembling the API invocation flow and applying access control policies,

being able to share, publish and manage description of APIs through a self-service portal,

and viewing analytics and data about your APIs.

App connect is used to connect different applications and have event trigger actions between the

applications.

For example, in the screenshot below you can see that app connect is being called when

you sales first contact is created, which triggers a nuro in a Google Sheets file which

then sends a message to a specific Slack channel and then creates a task in Insightly.

Using app connect you can automate your workflow, integrate your data and apps with over 75

connectors, use any of the 50 plus templates to quickly get started an create, and expose

flows as rest API's to help developers build applications quickly.

IBM event streams is a high throughput message bus built with Apache Kafka.

It features a fully managed Apache Kafka Service, which is built with the open source Apache

Kafka project.

It's also highly available and resilient.

It leverages the availability zone support from IBM Kubernetes service to ensure that

in the unlikely event of an entire zone being unavailable, your applications will continue

to work uninterrupted.

It also has an intuitive user experience.

And it also has an event driven architecture.

It integrates with services such as the Watson IoT platform and IBM Cloud functions to make

it easy to leverage event streams as the critical component of your event driven architecture.

IBM MQ provides proven enterprise grade messaging capabilities such as point to point and publish

subscribe models to facilitate the flow of information in the form of messages between

applications.

Here are some of the features of the MQ service.

It has a managed messaging service.

It also enables you to extend your enterprise messaging to the cloud.

You can connect new cloud-based apps to your core business systems by integrating with

your existing on Prem MQ Network.

You can quickly provision messaging capability in the cloud of your choice.

You can use it both on IBM Cloud AWS.

And you can manage your way.

You could either use the MQ Explorer, the MQ console, or script commands.

AI

Data science is a method for gleaning insights from structured and unstructured data using

analytics and machine learning.

Data is key here.

Data science excels when there is a massive amount of data to analyze.

What kind of problems can data science solve?

There are plenty of use cases across many industries such as:

Healthcare - uncover insights from clinical trials and patient data.

Banking - give on the spot answers to loan applications.

Education -support personalized planning tracking and data informed advisors.

These are all dealing with large amounts of data.

Good data quality is essential to solving these use cases, but about 80% of a data science’s

time is spent on finding, cleaning, and organizing data.

Once we have good data will be able to build models that can predict and forecast trends.

What is artificial intelligence?

AI is a huge field with many different domains.

What do they all have in common?

You can decently predict things if your model is good enough.

How do you make an affective model though?

It all comes down to the data you use to train that model.

To understand speech and language, we have tons and tons of data available through books,

videos, and other documents.

Once we have that data, how do we create the model?

This is where an iframe workers come into play.

These are incredibly popular frameworks that are flexible and powerful.

The biggest hurdle is the understanding of data science and AI principles to be able

to effectively use these frameworks.

All of these frameworks, such as TensorFlow, Scikit Learn, and PyTorch are open source

and have their various advantages and disadvantages.

Now, let's talk about some of the AI services available on IBM Cloud.

First, we have the AI Lifecycle management tools such as Watson Studio, Watson Machine

Learning, Watson OpenScale, and knowledge catalog.

Next, we have tools, which analyze text such as Natural Language Understanding and tone

analyzer.

We then have intelligent search called discovery.

We have a service, which enables you to build custom models for discovery and for Natural

Language Understanding and that's called knowledge studio.

We also have our speech and language services such as speech to text, text to speech, language

translator, and assistant.

Let's take a look at the AI Lifecycle management tools.

These tools will help you build and scale AI with trust and transparency by automating

AI Lifecycle management.

Watson Studio provides a suite of tools and a collaborative environment for data scientists,

developers, and domain experts.

Watson machine learning lets you run and deploy machine learning models anywhere across any

cloud.

Watson knowledge catalog lets you discover, curate, categorize, and share data assets

and models with access control.

Watson OpenScale lets you measure and manage AI models in production to promote trust and

confidence.

Watson Natural Language Understanding uses deep learning to extract metadata from text,

such as enemies, keywords, categories, sentiment, emotion, relation, and syntax.

Watson tone analyzer uses linguistic analysis to identify tones such as anger, disgust,

fear, joy, and sadness.

It could also detect social propensities such as extraversion and language styles such as

analytical, confident or tentative from text.

Now, let's take a look at Watson Assistant one of the most popular Watson services.

Watson Assistant lets you build conversational interfaces into any application device or

channel.

It has an easy to use UI.

It has a plug-in for Slack and other applications.

It also has a catalog of entities for industries so that you can quickly get started with some

of the most frequently asked questions over chat.

You can also quickly integrate with Twilio, Salesforce, Zendesk, and voice agents as well.

Watson Discovery is an intelligent search service that will deliver specific answers

to your questions while also serving up the entire document for exploration.

Watson Discovery can be trained with entire documents and you can use Watson Knowledge

Studio to build a custom model to train Watson Discovery with unique relationships and entities.

In this example, we trained Discovery with the car service manual to look for information

about what kind of engine oil to use.

With Discovery on the left-hand side, we are linked to the correct section and relevant

information is highlighted.

We also have a confidence score as well.

Now, let's take a look at the speech and language services that are offered on IBM Cloud.

First, we have speech to text, which is a service that transforms voice into written

text.

Next, we have text to speech, which enables you to convert written text into natural sounding

audio in a variety of languages and voices.

Also, we have language translator, which can dynamically translate news, patents, or conversational

documents from over 20 languages and can identify up to 68 languages.

Natural language classifier allows you to assign custom categories to input a text.

DATA ANALYTICS
------

Data analytics is the science of analyzing raw data in order to make conclusions about

that information.
Any type of information can be subjected to data analytics techniques to get insight that

can be used to improve things.

Let's talk about a few different types of Analytics and understand how they enable us

to make better decisions.

Descriptive analytics looks at past performance and understands that performance by mining

historical data to look for the reasons behind past success or failure.

Diagnostic analytics examines data or content to answer the question, why did this happen?

It is characterized by techniques such as drilldown, data discovery, data mining, and

correlations.

Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from data mining,

predictive modeling, and machine learning that analyze current and historical facts

to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events.

Prescriptive analytics takes advantage of the results of Descriptive and predictive

analytics and suggests a decision.

Spark is a unified analytics engine for big data processing with built in modules for

streaming, SQL, machine learning and graph processing.

It is an open source project with 750 contributors from 200 organizations.

Hadoop is a framework that allows for a distributed processing of large data sets across clusters

of computers using simple programming models.

Like Spark, it is also open source.

Hadoop uses the MapReduce programming model for parallel processing of large volumes of

data in a distributed environment.

There are five main analytics services on IBM Cloud.

We have analytics engine, streaming analytics, DB2 warehouse, Cognos dashboard, and information

server.

Let's dive a bit deeper into each one.

Analytics engine lets you deploy and develop applications using open source Apache Spark

and Apache Hadoop.

It also has on-demand scalability and is HIPAA ready for the Dallas region.

It also gives you the ability to customize the environment with third party analytics

libraries and packages.

The streaming analytics service is used to ingest, analyze, monitor and correlate data

in real time.

It evaluates a broad range of streaming data from unstructured text, video, audio data

to Geospatial and sensor data.

It performs real time analysis on data in motion and it can connect with virtually any

data source, whether unstructured, structured or streaming, and integrate with Hadoop and

Spark.

Lastly, it has built in Domain Analytics like machine learning, natural language, spatial

temporal, text, acoustics and more to create adaptive stream applications.

Db2 warehouse is a fully managed elastic cloud data warehouse that delivers independent scaling

of storage and compute and is built for machine learning.

You can train and run models directly in the DB2 warehouse engine using SQL, Python and

R.

It is highly scalable, and you can easily manage and independently scale up, compute

and storage.

It is secure.

You can control and monitor activity on your database with fine grained access control

and database auditing capabilities.

And it's also Oracle compatible.

You can leverage Db2's Oracle capability to run your existing Oracle applications on Db2

warehouse.

The Cognos Dashboard Service lets you add end to end data visualizations to your application.

The visualizations allow users to interact, for instance, they can drag and drop to quickly

find valuable insights on their own.

The visualizations have a live connection to the underlying data.

Updates the data will be reflected in the visualizations in real time.

You could also embed visualizations in your applications.

Data can be explored using filters and navigation paths.

The information server is a market leading data integration platform, which includes

a family of products that enable you to understand, cleanse, monitor, transform, and deliver data,

and to collaborate to bridge the gap between business and IT.

The data stage tool allows you to create jobs that can extract, transform, and load data.

The information governance catalog allows you to track data lineage.

The information analyzer provides data profiling and analysis to accurately evaluate the content

and structure of your data for consistency and quality.

DEVOPS

evOps is a set of practices that combine software development dev and it operations

ops.

It aims to shorten the development lifecycle by providing continuous deployment with high

software quality via automated tests and delivery governance.

Continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment are key topics for

DevOps.

Let's understand the differences between the three.

Continuous integration is a form of automation testing which checks that the application

is not broken whenever new commits are integrated into the main branch.

Developers using continuous integration aimed to merge their changes back to the main branch

as often as possible.

Continuous delivery goes one step further than continuous integration in that you have

an automated release process that merges your changes from the automated testing process

and pushes them to a staging environment.

Finally, continuous deployment goes one step further than continuous delivery and automates

the process of pushing changes from the staging environment to the production environment.

This enables new features and patches to reach your customer even faster.

The IBM Cloud DevOps services are a set of tools that support development, deployment,

continuous delivery, and operational tasks.

A DevOps toolchain is a set of tools and templates that automates the tasks of developing and

deploying your application.

It contains templates for building and deploying your project.

It also supports integration with many third-party tools.

The continuous delivery service automates the building and deployment of applications.

The delivery pipeline is a part of the continuous delivery service.

It allows developers to automate builds, unit tests, and deployments.

Here we see an example of using the DevOps approach with IBM Cloud tool chain.

First, we have the thing phase in which we use GitLab to plan our Sprint tasks using

issues.

Next, we have the code phase in which we commit changes to our code from the Orion web IDE

to our repository.

Once the commit is pushed, the deliver phase starts automatically.

In this phase, we delivered the latest version of our code to our staging and production

environments using our delivery pipeline.

Next, we have the run phase.

In this phase our application is pushed to a Cloud Foundry service or Kubernetes service

and we can see it running on IBM Cloud dashboard.

Next, we have the learn phase.

We use Google Analytics to gather data and feedback to incorporate into future releases.

Last, we have the culture.

Slack enables teams to communicate faster and more efficiently.

Here are some examples of tools which you can use to build your code in IBM Cloud toolchains:

GitLab CE, GitHub, and Bitbucket.

IBM Cloud toolchains offer a few different delivery options.

First, we can deliver a docker application and its helm chart together in source control

and have it built and deployed automatically to a Kubernetes cluster.

Another option is that you can develop an application and deploy changes using a Razee

agent in your Kubernetes cluster.

Most of the toolchain templates have an option of using Tekton as your delivery pipeline,

which is an open source Kubernetes native in framework for continuous delivery.

In the run stage you can choose the target or where your application will be deployed.

With Cloud Foundry, your application will be deployed as a Cloud Foundry application

on IBM Cloud.

You can also choose to run your applications on a Kubernetes cluster.

As a more advanced option, you can choose to run your application on a virtual server

of your choice.

In the learn stage, you can gather data and feedback about your application to continuously
improve and prioritize features in future releases.

Here are some of the integration the IBM Cloud tool chain support.

We support New Relic, which provides an observe ability platform to ensure your stack is running

as efficiently as possible.

We support Google Analytics, which is an analytic software which helps monitor your website

traffic and better understand your customers.

Ans Sauce labs, a cloud-based platform which specializes in automated testing for web and

mobile applications.

Then we have culture.

In the culture stage, IBM Cloud toolchains provides tools to improve cross functional

communication between teams.

We have slack, which is a channel based searchable messaging platform PagerDuty, an incident

response platform, and Jira, which is an issue tracking product developed by Atlas Ian that

allows bug tracking, an agile project management.

BLOCKCHAIN

A blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks that are linked using cryptography.

Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, timestamp, and transaction

data.

By design, A blockchain is resistant to modification of the data.

Once recorded, the data in any given block cannot be altered retroactively without alteration

of all subsequent blocks, which requires consensus of the network majority.

So, here we have a demo of the blockchain data structure and we have the data and the

previous hash.

And then the hash.

And then we can see this is the Genesis Block, which just means is the first block and then

we have the timestamp.

So, what we're going to do is we're going to add some data and add a new block, and

we're going to just say hello from IBM Cloud in the data field.

We'll add that block, and we can see the data is reflected in that block.

And the important thing to note is that previous hash 7CF.

We can see it's the same as the hash of the Genesis Block.
And our current hash for block number 1 ends in four, 1, four and the timestamp is August

24th.

And now if we add another block we can say hello from San Francisco, add that block and

we can see the previous block ends in 414.

Just like we are expecting it to and then we have our timestamp there and then we have

that hash.

Let's talk about some key elements of a blockchain network.

Blockchains are distributed permanent and record transaction between two parties.

They are distributed.

All network participants have access to the distributed Ledger and it's immutable record

of transactions.

They're also immutable.

No participant can change or tamper with the transaction after it's been recorded to the

shared Ledger, and they use smart contracts to speed transactions.

A set of roles called Smart contracts is stored on the Blockchain and executed automatically.

What is hyperledger fabric?

Hyperledger fabric is an implementation of blockchain technology that is designed as

the foundation for developing blockchain applications.

It has an emphasis on ledger, mark objects, confidentiality, resiliency, and scalability.

Due to popularity, hyperledger fabric has been adopted by major cloud providers including,

Alibaba, AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, and others.

Hyperledger fabric is an Apache two licensed open source project with the founding codebase

originally donated to the Linux Foundation by IBM and digital asset.

Let's take a deeper dive into smart contracts within hyperledger fabric.

Smart contracts are required to create a blockchain application with hyperledger fabric.

Fabric offers SDK's in node.js and Java and support for Python and Go is planned for later

releases.

Smart contracts are executed to change or read a value in the world state.

These smart contract executions are recorded as transactions within the blocks on the Blockchain.

In this way, we have a tamper-proof history of all transactions which have happened on

a particular blockchain network.

Let's talk a little bit about consensus.

Consensus is the process by which nodes agree on the order of transactions.

There are multiple ways of doing consensus, however you do it, the aim of consensus is

to get from the before state on the left to the after state on the right.

In this case, there are four nodes, two of which think that the world state is ABC.

One mistakenly thinks it's DEF due to network latency and one is a malicious node who will

do anything to convince you that the world state is XYZ.

Consensus will get to a situation where all the good nodes agree that the world state

is ABC and the bad node is just ignored.

Consensus assumes that there is a sufficient portion of good actors on the network who

are trustworthy.

The value of Blockchain comes from participants sharing common smart contracts and agreeing

on the source of truth.

Since transactions are automated, participants can be assured money is received upon the

agreement of their contract.

Participants also have visibility into the history of a particular asset and how that

ownership has changed overtime.

This is the IBM blockchain platform in a single chart.

It's based on hyperledger fabric and runs on the IBM Cloud platform, although other

options are available.

IBM blockchain platform aims to help with the entire lifecycle of a blockchain solution

from inception through the deployment and beyond.

There are set of tools for the solution development as well as tools to allow clients to govern

and operate blockchain business networks.

IBM's key differentiators are advanced tooling for building, operating, and growing blockchain

networks and the ability to deploy blockchain networks anywhere.

IOT

IoT or Internet of Things is a system of interrelated computing devices that transfer data over

a network without requiring human interaction.

There are many use cases for IoT, and here are three.

One.
We have predictive maintenance.

Keeping assets up and running has the potential to significantly decrease operational expenditures,

saving companies millions of dollars.

Two.

Asset tracking.

The goal of asset tracking is to allow an enterprise to easily locate and monitor key

assets along the supply chain to optimize logistics, maintain inventory levels, prevent

quality issues, and detect theft.

Three.

Connected vehicles.

These are computer enhanced vehicles that automate many normal driving tasks.

In some cases even driving themselves.

IBM Cloud's Internet of Things platform or the IoT platform, lets you communicate with

and consume data from connected devices and gateways using a builtin web console to monitor

your IoT data and analyze it in real time.

It has several features such as quickly and securely register and connect your devices

and gateways.

Information management.

Control what happens to the data that is received from your connected devices.

Manage data storage, configure data transformation actions, and integrate with other data services.

Analyze in real time.

Monitor real time device data through rules, analytics and dashboards.

Risk and security management.

Our secure by design control capabilities protect the integrity of your IoT solution

through secure connectivity and access control for users and applications.

The IBM Cloud IoT platform has a powerful dashboard that allows for viewing connected

devices by device type, showing how much data has been transferred, monitoring real time

sensor data, and Geo location data about your devices.

How does it work?

The IoT platform uses the following IoT device data flow.

First, you must register your IoT device in the IoT platform.
Your IoT devices send data using MQTT to the IoT platform, which acts as a message broker

and writes data to cloudant IBM event streams and DB2 warehouse.

Then the data set is also written to cloud object storage for long term storage.

Lastly, analytics services are used to connect to the device, an external data sources to

enable custom dashboards for business users.

CLOUD PAKS

Cloud Paks are containerized software solutions built to run anywhere?

I like to think of it as a bundle of continuous software.

The goal of the Cloud Pak is to make container management and application modernization easier

for an organization.

Cloud Paks come in a variety of use cases, which we'll explore later.

For now, let's look at the values of Cloud Paks.

Cloud Paks have a modular architecture, meaning you can pick and choose which software you

want to deploy.

Cloud Paks put AI to work.

They operationalize AI throughout your business.

Cloud Paks are built on OpenShift, which allows them to run anywhere.

So, what do we mean by anywhere?

Cloud Paks can be run on any platform you choose.

You can install them on IBM Cloud.

You can install them on premise.

Use your own hardware or with the Cloud Pak system, or you can install them on any cloud

by first provisioning OpenShift and then installing Cloud Paks on top.

The following picture is a representation of how different Cloud Paks are available.

The six Cloud Paks that we will cover are applications, data, integration, automation,

security, and multi-cloud management.

The Cloud Pak for applications has tools to help you modernize existing applications and

build new cloud native ones.

The four main capabilities are:

Accelerator' for cloud native development, which bring together open source technologies

and put them in a microservices based framework.

IBM modernization and developer tools.

Modernization guidance gives you a plan to start strategically updating your applications.

A Java EE platform is a collection of Java APIs that help you write secure, flexible

server side applications.

Mobile app development tools for building apps for mobile, wearables, conversation,

web or progressive web apps.

Cloud Pak for data has the following features built in:

It has a single platform that integrates data management, data governance, and analysis.

It has databases so you can spin up your favorite IBM or open source database.

It has data governance built in, like automated discovery and classification of data, and

masking of sensitive data.

It also has data virtualization so you can query easily across multiple sources, on cloud

or on premises.

It has IBM Cloud AI services, such as Watson Assistant or Discovery.

And it has AI model lifecycle tools, such as Jupyter or RStudio to create notebook,

serve them with Watson Machine Learning, or automate the whole process with Auto AI

Cloud Pak from Multi Cloud Management is an IT management platform designed to provide

full visibility and control wherever your workloads run.

Using the dashboard, you can monitor application lifecycle management so you can deploy and

move application across clouds.

It provides cloud protection and compliance with automated policy enforcement and compliance

testing.

It has built in SRE tooling with AI OPS to use event correlation and machine learning

to improve operational efficiency and readiness.

It also has many add-on capabilities from IBM partners such as Turbonomic, Sysdig, Humio,

and Hazelcast..

Cloud Pak for integration is a complete set of integration capabilities to efficiently

connect your applications and data wherever they live.

You can use API connect, app connect, MQ and event streams and you have the Aspera high

speed data transfer so you can move data of any size around the world at maximum speed.

IBM Cloud Pak for security is a platform that helps you uncover hidden threats.
Make more informed risk-based decisions and prioritize your teams' time.

It has core platform services such as threat, intelligence, insights, and data Explorer,

and has integrations with existing tools and data such as Qradar and Splunk.

The IBM Cloud Pak for automation provides applications in core areas where automation

provides benefits, content, workflow, decisions, and capture cloud fact for automation.

Provides low code consumable tools, API's and application connectors that make it easy

to consume content in business applications.

You can also automate your end to end workflow with IBM business automation workflow and

you can use IBM operational decision manager to automate the implementation of business

policies in your organization.