Armonk, New York and San Francisco, 21 Jul 2015
Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) is announcing the delivery of industry-leading enterprise-class containers that make it easier for clients to deliver production applications across their hybrid environments.
Containers give developers flexibility to build once and move applications without the need to rewrite or redeploy their code. IBM Containers, based on Docker and built on Bluemix, IBM's platform as a service, provides a more efficient environment that enables faster integration and access to analytics, big data and security services. Enterprises will now be able to use the combination of IBM, Docker, Cloud Foundry and OpenStack to create a new generation of portable distributed applications.
Also announced today, IBM has become a founding member of a coalition of partners and users to create the Open Container Platform (OCP) that will ensure containers are interoperable. The creation of the OCP will produce a collaborative environment that fosters the rapid growth of container-based solutions, offering developers a single industry-agreed-on approach and direction.
"Our ongoing partnership with IBM has been a great win for the rapidly growing number of enterprises and start-ups alike that see Docker as the foundation for a new generation of business-critical distributed applications," Nick Stinemates, VP, business development and technical alliances for Docker. "By making a production-ready, Docker-based container service available for developers, IBM is emphasising a faster time to value and inspiring millions of developers to leverage the growing opportunity of innovating in the cloud."
Modern developers need more than basic execution of containers in the cloud. Containers should be empowered with advanced capabilities allowing production applications to be deployed and managed with ease, giving developers the freedom to focus on innovation. The IBM Container service provides significant business benefits to the enterprise that centres on a faster time to market, seamless application portability, higher confidence and reliability for enterprise applications, resulting in an overall reduced development time and cost through a more efficient configuration management across the DevOps value chain.
IBM Containers accomplishes this through:
* Integrated tools such as log analytics, performance monitoring and delivery pipeline, simplifying life cycle management.
* Elastic scaling and auto recovery, providing resources when needed most.
* Zero downtime deployments utilising Active Deploy, ensuring users are never impacted by application enhancements.
* Private overlays, load balancing and automated routing, enabling capabilities to address even the most complex business requirements.
* Support for persistent storage, allowing data-centric application creation.
* Automated image security and vulnerability scanning, with Vulnerability Advisor, alerts to security weaknesses before deployment.
* Access to Bluemix services, a powerful catalogue of over 100 cloud services, including Watson, analytics, IOT and mobile.
Additionally, IBM has demonstrated the industry's best performance of Java on Docker. IBM Java is optimised to be two times faster and occupies half the memory when used with the IBM Containers service. Moreover, as a Docker-based service, IBM Containers include open features and interfaces such as the new Docker Compose orchestration services.
As a unique reseller of the Docker Trusted Registry, IBM is the first to fully integrate the on-premises Docker Trusted Registry software with its flagship DevOps and cloud offerings, beginning with IBM UrbanCode and IBM Pure Application Systems. Through this relationship, IBM is again enabling containers for enterprise production workloads in hybrid cloud deployments.
The DevOps support of IBM Containers enable enterprises to build, automate and orchestrate the deployment of multi-platform, multi-container and traditional workloads together in application environments. Regardless of the phases of the application or delivery pipeline - development, test, staging, production - IBM Containers help move these workloads across various cloud environments with enterprise-class management and security. By working across hybrid clouds and integrating with both on-premises Docker Trusted Registry and cloud-based IBM Container services, developers can easily navigate any cloud development need.
Mindjet taps Bluemix for rapid application development using IBM Containers. Mindjet is a late-stage start-up known best for Spigit, a crowdsourcing platform for innovation with hundreds of large enterprise customers and over 4 million users. With annual growth of over 30%, the Spigit team saw operations costs increase and scaling limitations of its existing infrastructure, slowing Mindjet's pace of innovation and limiting its capacity to add new users.
Mindjet turned to IBM Cloud for its strong enterprise expertise and cloud services, enabling increased innovation for its clients. Using IBM Containers on Bluemix, Mindjet helped its development teams operate more efficiently, innovate with speed, improve engagement and boost productivity, resulting in application deployment times of mere seconds.
"While we started our application development on Heroku, it wasn't long before the resulting operations costs started to overtax our team, limiting us in terms of development pace and capabilities," said James Gardner, CTO at Mindjet. "The agile and open capabilities of IBM's Bluemix, including the new Docker-based IBM Container services, helped us cut our deployment times to mere seconds and increase our freedom to do what every start-up wants to do more of, focus on innovation for our clients."
Even though Mindjet evaluated other cloud platforms and providers, including HP, it was IBM's Bluemix that offered the supercharged scalability required to meet the demands of its enterprise clients. Mindjet also used the IBM Bluemix Garage team to incorporate several DevOps services into its operations, achieving seamless integration and controlled production deployment.
World-class support of Docker-based containers is a high priority for enterprise clients who want to leverage containers with production applications. Containers have proven to be effective in a number of enterprises in industries such as financial services, hospitality, retail, healthcare, cloud service providers and others. Many of these large enterprises, as well as start-ups like Mindjet, worked side by side with IBM on the creation of IBM Containers by building and deploying real-world scenarios, which prove containers can be leveraged for enterprise production applications.
IBM total cloud revenue - covering public, private and hybrid engagements - was $7.7 billion over the previous 12 months at the end of March 2015; it grew more than 60% in first quarter 2015. IBM's cloud delivered as a service business, a subset of the total, includes PaaS offerings such as Bluemix.
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