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March 29, 2021
Alex woodie
Arguably the crown jewel in IBM’s $ 34 billion acquisition of Red Hat is OpenShift, a Kubernetes-based container management system for running cloud-native applications. While it is unlikely that OpenShift will ever integrate directly with IBM i and its applications, IBM has high hopes that the software will help usher in a new wave of application modernization and innovation among IBM customers. i.
Joe Cropper, engineer at IBM Power, presented the case for the initiation of OpenShift by IBM i stores two weeks ago at the IBM i Futures conference, hosted by COMMON. Cropper, you’ll recall, offered Power Shops to take a look at OpenShift during a session at last fall’s POWERUp virtual event. With its new session, entitled IBM i wears Red Hat Volume 2, Cropper goes one step further.
Cropper covered a lot of ground in his 45-minute session. The IBM Master Inventor is clearly familiar with both enterprise and open source technologies, and displays a deep level of understanding of how they fit together, which is not an easy thing to do. It’s safe to say that things like containers and Kubernetes are about as foreign to most IBM i professionals as calls to RPG and Db2 for i databases are to ‘mainstream IT pros. “. If Cropper is right about how the future will shape, that familiarity gap won’t exist for long.
The gist of Cropper’s case is that OpenShift is the virtual foundation upon which many new and exciting applications will run – whether in the cloud, on-premises, or a mix of the two doesn’t matter – and in In addition, IBM i shops are well positioned to take advantage of these next generation applications thanks to the work done by IBM to integrate OpenShift deeply into the Power platform and the surrounding ecosystem.
“Power systems are recording systems and your IBM i partitions have the crown jewels, if you will, of the organization. You have a huge amount of data, ”says Cropper. The idea is “to surround this data with these new applications.
“You may be considering building new digital or mobile front-ends for data that exist on the IBM i platform,” he continues. “You may be looking to take advantage of a new kind of analysis. So all these technologies can be deployed on OpenShift and then seamlessly connect to what is on those databases, on the IBM i partition. “
These next-generation applications, developed in languages such as Node.js or Golang, will target Kubernetes as a runtime engine, as they significantly reduce dependencies on the underlying server, ensuring application portability as well as scalability. “For new cloud native applications, people are inclined to look to containers. We see these things working on Red Hat OpenShift, ”says Cropper.
These cloud-native applications can integrate with existing IBM i applications and databases using APIs. But more importantly, these new apps can also run right alongside IBM i (or AIX or Linux) line of business apps, because OpenShift is supported on the Power platform.
Red Hat OpenShift is the key technological element connecting the existing world to the new cloud-native world.
“There are huge benefits to doing this,” says Cropper. “You get the least latency or the least severity of the data. Communication takes place entirely in memory. You don’t even need to access the physical network. All of this happens through the Virtual I / O Server (VIOS) and you get extremely high bandwidth, low latency communications. “
This does not require any modification to IBM i applications or the Db2 for i database, explains Cropper. Databases and applications can remain as they are. This may not be the classic definition of “application modernization”. But it makes it possible to exploit the digital capacities developed in native cloud applications.
“It’s ultimately to help you build this set of next-generation applications and leverage this wealth of containers that the open-source ecosystem [is] build, day in and day out, ”says Cropper. “There is a tremendous amount of technology that this allows you to tap into.”
In addition to OpenShift, several other infrastructure components are factored into this new hybrid cloud equation. This includes IBM’s Cloud Pak for multi-cloud management, WebSphere Hybrid Edition (formerly Cloud Pak for Applications) and Ansible, according to Cropper.
“They are all enabled to run on the Power Systems platform. He is IBM certified. It is Red Hat certified. It’s business grade. These are all of the things you need to run a vital business, ”he says. “You really have a rich and robust, chip-to-top-layer stack with all the applications and everything in between.”
It’s really a marriage of two worlds: the legacy world of IBM i apps (and AIX apps to some extent) and the new world of cloud native apps running on Kubernetes, which runs on a version of Linux. Linux is the big winner of the new computing paradigm from an operating system perspective, but that doesn’t mean IBM i, AIX, or z / OS will be replaced.
It’s about keeping the old things that work, but using the newer ones to make the old ones work better. It’s also about keeping legacy platforms up to date and ensuring that young people who know the latest skills can continue to develop applications that leverage all the data and business logic that continues to exist on them ( although there is always a need for admins and operators who know their way around a 5250 command line until the platform is six feet below the ground)
“Many of you who use IBM i know the power of the platform,” says Cropper. “Now we’re marrying that with this new set of cloud native technologies that we’ve talked about with OpenShift, and we’re really connecting it to this other set of capabilities that exists with the new world of containers and so on. and giving you the ability to link these worlds together and run these apps on the same platform. So you get that proven, reliable security from the platform you know, love, and have owned for years. You can continue to enjoy these platform benefits in this new cloud native era. “
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