UPDATED 12:02 EDT / MAY 11 2020

CLOUD

Q&A: IBM exec explains easier multicloud management using Cloud Paks

While the mantras of cloud computing are speed and agility, the process of migrating enterprise applications is anything but. If only there was a way to make managing the menageries of microservices easier.

“If I’m an enterprise, my goal is how can I accelerate and how can I automate? Cloud Paks enables that,” said Dinesh Nirmal (pictured), chief product officer, Cloud Pak, at IBM Corp.

Nirmal spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. They discussed IBM Cloud Paks. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

So, let’s start with the basics. What are IBM Cloud Paks? What clouds do they live on? 

Nirmal: CloudPaks are cloud agnostic. So, the whole goal is that you build once and it can run anywhere. That is the basic mantra, or principle, that we want to build Cloud Paks with. Look at them as a set of microservices containerized in a form that it can run on any public cloud or behind a firewall. That’s the whole premise of Cloud Paks. It’s an integrated set of services that solve a specific set of business problems and also accelerates building each set of applications and solutions. Meaning you already have a set of stitched-together services that accelerates the application development. It automates a lot of things for you.

Let me give you one example: Cloud Pak for Data. It’s a rich set of services that will give you all the value that you need all the way from ingest to visualization. So you don’t have to go build a service or a product or user product for ingest, then use another product for ETL, use another product for building models, another product to manage those models. The Cloud Pak for Data will solve all the problems end to end.

And whether you are a data engineer, data scientist, or you are a business analyst, you can collaborate through the Cloud Paks.

You said specifically that Cloud Paks are cloud agnostic. Is there some connection with the partnership that IBM has with Red Hat?

Nirmal: All Cloud Paks are optimized for Red Hat OpenShift. All the value that Red Hat and OpenShift brings is what Cloud Pak is built on. So, if you look at it as a Lego, the base Lego layer is OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And then on top of it sit Cloud Paks, and applications and solutions on top of that.

When I think of cloud-native, modern application development, simplicity is not the first thing I think of. How are you helping customers deal with that complexity? 

Nirmal: The honest truth, Stu, is that enterprise applications are not an app that you create and put on an iPhone, right? It is much more complex, because it’s dealing with hundreds of millions of people trying to transact with the system. You need to make sure there is a disaster recovery, backup, scalability, elasticity, all those things. Security, obviously, very critical piece, and multitenancy. All those things have to come together in an enterprise application. So, when people talk about simplicity, it comes at a price.

What Cloud Paks has done is that we have really focused on the user experience and design piece. So you as an end user have a great experience using the integrated set of services. The complexity part will be there still, because enterprise applications tend to be complex by nature. But we are making it much easier for you to develop, deploy, manage and govern what you are building.

What’s new for Cloud Paks in 2020? 

Nirmal: We have a set of Cloud Paks, but we want to expand and make it extensible. It’s already built on an open platform. Now, how do we make sure our partners and independent service vendors can come and build on top of the base-cloud part? So one area of focus is to continuously innovate across the Cloud Paks, but also make it much more extensible for third parties to come and build more value on top of the Cloud Pak itself.

The other area we’re focusing on is MCM — multicloud management. There is tremendous appetite for customers to move data or applications on cloud, and not only on one cloud, but hybrid cloud. So multicloud management definitely helps on that perspective.

So our focus this year is going to be: Make it extensible, make it more open, but at the same time continuously innovate on every single Cloud Pak to make that journey for customers on automating and accelerating application development easier.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Think Digital Event Experience. Neither IBM Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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