IBM Cloud services for a Technology Startup Company

I came across a friend who incorporated a Technology Startup Company, after few rounds of discussions, i could visualize his challenges which should be for any startup. The primary challenge for most of startup companies is getting fund / money to invest and optimized spending on real needs. Most part of it goes into finding a place to house the startup, human and hardware resources. Hiring the right talent,  setting up software and systems/servers/network infrastructure etc., with minimum utilization of real-estate.

IBM Cloud services offer Software, Platform and Infrastructure as a Service under one umbrella, which can address these challenges. By considering to use Softlayer IaaS offering, start-up companies could actually reduce lot of overhead

• Can have low power desktop machines connecting to mature development server setups in Softlayer environment
• Can depend on Softlayer professional team to manage the lab network, backup & recovery
• Can leverage IBM Navigator on Cloud to maintain enterprise content while giving access to the content / collaboration across desktop/laptop/mobile
• Quickly apply DevOps capabilities to optimize software scaling, integration and delivery which increases customer satisfaction

It is not necessary to subscribe for all of the services at ones. Adopting step-by-step bottom-up approach would give time to the entrepreneur to understand the real needs and expand accordingly.

First, optimizing infrastructure by subscribing to Softlayer IaaS will save on real-estate space and procurement of systems/servers. It's like leasing whatever hardware configuration is required, use it, scale it if the need be and once the work is done, release it. An important priority for a start-up would be to deliver value to market in the shortest possible time. So, securing the work done and using optimized infrastructure should be very important this is value to money

Second, focus should be on the Platform. Building an open standards based platform by using the existing services offered in the cloud and delivering it as a service (PaaS) to the workforce will enhance productivity. Companies can leverage continuous integration and devOps deliver platform using IBM BlueMix (and many other ever-growing services it offers)

Lastly, the in-house software used to manage company business/artifacts could be moved to cloud. Documentation like design docs, requirement specifications, test cases, finances, company policies etc., needs a work management / review process to harness the information, store and retrieve it effectively. Securing this company intellectual property is very important. Enterprise Content Management with IBM Navigator on Cloud delivers Software as a Service (SaaS) to address these concerns. Here is a demo of how this could be achieved https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoPFKWdhnTI&rel=0


While the overall IBM Cloud offers much more that what we discussed, the above minimum services could be leveraged and scale to other offerings as the start-up grows into an enterprise.

• Some interesting case studies that help understand more : http://www.entrepreneurcountryglobal.com/ecosystem-economics/tag/case%20studies
• For more information please refer IBM Cloud Marketplace  http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/marketplace.html
• IBM SoftLayer woos startups  http://bit.ly/1usx3h8

Enjoy instant Applications like instant Coffee using IBM BlueMix - Part 1

Ever wondered to develop a software application using agile development methodology and continuous integration without the overheads of setting up a complex development environment? Ever wondered to distribute software applications with iterative enhancements and fixes, directly to your customers?

BlueMix - IBM is the way to explore! "A platform where developers can act like kids in a sandbox..." BlueMix is built on top of Cloud Foundry (PaaS) leveraging the power and flexibility offered by Softlayer (IaaS) 

So let's start understanding Cloud Foundry now. 

Cloud Foundry (CF) is a popular Cloud Computing Platform as a Service funded by VMware and EMC Corporation. As it's an open source project many experts refer it as Open Cloud for Platform as a Service (PaaS) where applications could be deployed, executed and scaled dynamically. Often, enterprise scale applications, due to their complexity, demand special skills to deploy and configure. Cloud Foundry PaaS eliminates this cost.

At a very high level CF has the following components 

• Self-service application execution engine: Manages executing application instances, tracks started instances and broadcast status messages
• An automation engine for application deployment and lifecycle management: An orchestration process that governs the sequence of events to install, deploy and configure applications
• Scriptable command line interface (CLI): Used for deploying and managing applications in Cloud Foundry

These components aid the developers to create cloud based applications, push the apps (deploy) to stage them on the cloud infrastructure, trouble shoot when needed. As developers, we also understand that applications require various types of Runtimes, which are provided by Buildpacks. The moment an application is pushed to the CF, it examines the application artifacts, detect which runtimes are required and applies the respective buildpacks. CF by default provides System Buildpacks (java, node.js, GO, PHP, Python, Ruby) also there are many Community provided buildpacks (hosted on github)

Upcoming... Part 2 - Deployment of an application on Cloud Foundation (CF) and discuss the relationship between BlueMix and CF

What is all the buzz about "Infrastructure as a Service" offered in Cloud

With Cloud technologies gaining momentum I am sure many of us want some insights into this area. I came across Softlayer after IBM acquired this company and started exploring to understand how it provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in the Cloud environment. So I started this journey looking into aspects like what Softlayer offers, it's strengths and a use case.

Softlayer is a global hosting company with ~21 thousand customers located in 140 countries. In the late 90's the word hosting company mostly referrers to hosting websites but now, Softlayer host machines / servers/nodes (with pre-installed images / software if required). It could be imagined like a huge mega lab that has the capacity to instantly provision machines with a variety of configurations for its customers located in 140 countries.

In order to cater to customers across the world, Softlayer has 13 data centers (expected to grow to ~30 by this year end) strategically located in various parts of the world. To improve network throughput, it uses private network lines between data centers for which customers are not charged. As we know that both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic are existing in today's network, Softlayer supports Dual Network Stack, which means the nodes (and its network infrastructure like routers etc.,) are capable of processing both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. Also Softlayer uses Global DNS.

The moment a customer request is processed & approved, the enterprise scale servers (with high availability / load balanced / clustered) are deployed and provisioned in real time using orchestration and automation framework. The framework defines & executes the installation / deployment sequence of a software stack and automatically configures the environment in one-go, ready for the customer to start using it.

Benefits to the customer-

• Need not worry about real estate space, maintenance and  availability of the servers.
• Improves consumibility as there is no shelf life after procuring the software
• No skills required to install / deploy & configure enterprise scale software
• Software / Hardware issues are addressed by professional monitoring & services teams instantaneously (almost the same time, customer encountered the issues or in some cases even before the customer realizes)

Use case
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/43260.wss
http://www.musicmastermind.com/
Music Mastermind's  ZyaMusic a cloud based solution using its patented Sound Better technology, allows users to create original music and share it using smartphones and tablets. They adopted hybrid cloud architecture and successfully launched their product world-wide, reducing the total resource footprint that translated into visible monthly savings

The biggest differentiating factors for a SoftLayer when compared with its competition are

• Its capability to provide Hybrid Cloud for customers. A Hybrid Cloud is a combination of nodes/ servers hosted, on-premises (on-Prem) of an enterprise and nodes hosted in the Softlayer Cloud. This type of Cloud offering is preferred among enterprises with strict regulatory policies to keep critical data inside the enterprise (example Banking industry)
• Allows customers to mix & match bare metal servers and virtual server instances to be provisioned in the cloud

To conclude, as more and more enterprises are considering to shift their focus to cloud services, offering infrastructure and platform as a service in the cloud will become the fundamental element to develop software using pure Agile methodology and deliver software services, fixes and new features in real-time, reducing the overall cost.