 | |
| Type | cloud computing, IaaS, PaaS, cloud services |
|---|---|
| Website | www |
IBM Cloud (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM.
| | |
| Type | cloud computing, IaaS, PaaS, cloud services |
|---|---|
| Website | www |
IBM Cloud (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM.
As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services [1] including compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, machine learning, and developer tools.
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| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Hosting |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Founder | Lance Crosby |
| Headquarters | Dallas, Texas, USA |
| Products | Dedicated Hosting, Managed Services |
| Parent | IBM (since 2013) |
| ASN | |
| Website | softlayer |
SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. (now IBM Cloud) was a dedicated server, managed hosting, and cloud computing provider, founded in 2005 and acquired by IBM in 2013. SoftLayer initially specialized in hosting workloads for gaming companies and startups, but shifted focus to enterprise workloads after its acquisition. [2]
SoftLayer had bare-metal compute offerings before other large cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services. [3]
SoftLayer has hosted workloads for companies such as The Hartford, WhatsApp, Whirlpool, Daimler, and Macy's. [4]
In June 2013, IBM acquired SoftLayer, a public cloud platform, to serve as the foundation for its IaaS offering. Bluemix was announced for public beta in February 2014 [18] after having been developed since early 2013. [19] Bluemix was based on the open source Cloud Foundry project and ran on SoftLayer infrastructure. IBM announced the general availability of the Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering in July 2014. [20]
By April 2015, Bluemix included a suite of over 100 cloud-based development tools "including social, mobile, security, analytics, database, and IoT (internet of things). [21] Bluemix had grown to 83,000 users in India with growth of approximately 10,000 users each month. [21]
A year after announcement, Bluemix had made little headway in the cloud-computing platform space relative to its competition, and remained substantially behind market leaders Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. [22] By August 2016, little had changed in market acceptance of the Bluemix offering. [23] In February 2016, [24] IBM Bluemix includes IBM's Function as a Service (FaaS) system, or Serverless computing offering, that is built using open source [25] from the Apache OpenWhisk incubator project largely credited [26] to IBM for seeding. This system, equivalent to Amazon Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, Oracle Cloud Fn or Google Cloud Functions, allows calling of a specific function in response to an event without requiring any resource management from the developer. [27]
In May 2017 IBM released Kubernetes support as the IBM Bluemix Container Service, later renamed to the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS). [28] IKS was built using the open source Kubernetes project. This system, equivalent to Amazon Web Services EKS, Microsoft Azure AKS, or Google Cloud GKE, aims to provide a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts. In October 2017, IBM announced that they would rebrand their cloud as IBM Cloud brand, merging all components, thus retiring the Bluemix and Softlayer brands. [29] In March 2018, IBM launched an industry first managed Kubernetes service on bare metal. [30] In August 2019, 3 weeks after the close of Red Hat acquisition, IBM launched a managed Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud. [31]
In November 2019, IBM has announced that it had designed the world's first financial services-ready public cloud and that Bank of America was its first committed collaborator and anchor customer, joined shortly thereafter in 2020 by BNP Paribas as its first European anchor client. [32] IBM announced in April 2021 the general availability of IBM Cloud for Financial Services, including support for Red Hat OpenShift and other cloud-native technologies. [33] In July 2021, it was announced that SAP is onboarding two of its finance and data management solutions to IBM Cloud for Financial Services. [34] In September 2021, it was CaixaBank's turn to boost digital capabilities with IBM Cloud for Financial Services [35] and onboarding to new IBM Cloud Multizone Region in Spain. [36]
In 2019, IBM partnered with the United States Tennis Association (USTA) to provide new AI-powered tools for the US Open. [37]
In May 2020, IBM announced agreements with six European companies, including Osram and Crédit Mutuel, that use IBM Cloud to access advanced technologies such as AI, blockchain and analytics. [38]
IBM Cloud continued to be considered a leader in bare-metal in 2020, and distinguished itself by providing over 11 million possible custom configurations with the latest Power, Intel, and AMD CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. [39]
In 2021, IBM announced it would achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. [40]
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of applications by providing a web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to configure a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server-instances as needed, paying by the second for active servers – hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy. In November 2010, Amazon switched its own retail website platform to EC2 and AWS.
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.
AppScale is a software company that offers cloud infrastructure software and services to enterprises, government agencies, contractors, and third-party service providers. The company commercially supports one software product, AppScale ATS, a managed hybrid cloud infrastructure software platform that emulates the core AWS APIs. In 2019, the company ended commercial support for its open-source serverless computing platform AppScale GTS, but AppScale GTS source code remains freely available to the open-source community.
The following is a comparison of cloud-computing software and providers.
OpenShift is a family of containerization software products developed by Red Hat. Its flagship product is the OpenShift Container Platform — a hybrid cloud platform as a service built around Linux containers orchestrated and managed by Kubernetes on a foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The family's other products provide this platform through different environments: OKD serves as the community-driven upstream, Several deployment methods are available including self-managed, cloud native under ROSA, ARO and RHOIC on AWS, Azure, and IBM Cloud respectively, OpenShift Online as software as a service, and OpenShift Dedicated as a managed service.
Abiquo Hybrid Cloud Management Platform is a web-based cloud computing software platform developed by Abiquo. Written entirely in Java, it is used to build, integrate and manage public and private clouds in homogeneous environments. Users can deploy and manage servers, storage system and network and virtual devices. It also supports LDAP integration.
NuoDB is a cloud-native distributed SQL database company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2008 and incorporated in 2010, NuoDB technology has been used by Dassault Systèmes, as well as FinTech and financial industry entities including UAE Exchange, Temenos, and Santander Bank.
VNS3 is a software-only virtual appliance that allows users to control access and network topology and secure data in motion across public and private clouds. VNS3 is a virtual router, switch, firewall, protocol re-distributor, and SSL/IPSec VPN concentrator. The Network Virtualization Software creates a customer-controlled overlay network over top of the underlying network backbone.
Veeam Software is a privately held US-based information technology company owned by Insight Partners. It develops backup, disaster recovery and modern data protection software for virtual, cloud-native, SaaS, Kubernetes and physical workloads. Veeam Software was co-founded by two Russian entrepreneurs, Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov. While Veeam's start was built on protecting data across virtualized workloads, it has significantly expanded to protect data across a wide variety of platforms from AWS, Azure, google Cloud, Microsoft 365, Kubernetes etc. Veeam's current CEO, Anand Eswaran, has been pushing Veeam's strategy to accelerate share in the enterprise with adding several layers to Veeam's partnerships. Veeam took over the #1 market share in the data protection category in 2H'22. The company headquarters is in Kirkland, Washington, United States.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google that provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning, alongside a set of management tools. It runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, and Google Docs, according to Verma et al. Registration requires a credit card or bank account details.
BOSH is an open-source software project that offers a toolchain for release engineering, software deployment and application lifecycle management of large-scale distributed services. The toolchain is made up of a server and a command line tool. BOSH is typically used to package, deploy and manage cloud software. While BOSH was initially developed by VMware in 2010 to deploy Cloud Foundry PaaS, it can be used to deploy other software. BOSH is designed to manage the whole lifecycle of large distributed systems.
PerfKit Benchmarker is an open source benchmarking tool used to measure and compare cloud offerings. PerfKit Benchmarker is licensed under the Apache 2 license terms. PerfKit Benchmarker is a community effort involving over 500 participants including researchers, academic institutions and companies together with the originator, Google.
In computer networking, a bare-metal server is a physical computer server that is used by one consumer, or tenant, only. Each server offered for rental is a distinct physical piece of hardware that is a functional server on its own. They are not virtual servers running in multiple pieces of shared hardware.
The Serverless Framework is a free and open-source web framework written using Node.js. Serverless is the first framework developed for building applications on AWS Lambda, a serverless computing platform provided by Amazon as a part of Amazon Web Services. Currently, applications developed with Serverless can be deployed to other function as a service providers, including Microsoft Azure with Azure Functions, IBM Bluemix with IBM Cloud Functions based on Apache OpenWhisk, Google Cloud using Google Cloud Functions, Oracle Cloud using Oracle Fn, Kubeless based on Kubernetes, Spotinst and Webtask by Auth0.
Function as a service (FaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and manage application functionalities without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with developing and launching an app. Building an application following this model is one way of achieving a "serverless" architecture, and is typically used when building microservices applications.
Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers. The company allows these services to be provisioned on demand over the Internet.
CloudBolt is a hybrid cloud management platform developed by CloudBolt Software for deploying and managing virtual machines (VMs), applications, and other IT resources, both in public clouds and in private data centers.
Alluxio is an open-source virtual distributed file system (VDFS). Initially as research project "Tachyon", Alluxio was created at the University of California, Berkeley's AMPLab as Haoyuan Li's Ph.D. Thesis, advised by Professor Scott Shenker & Professor Ion Stoica. Alluxio sits between computation and storage in the big data analytics stack. It provides a data abstraction layer for computation frameworks, enabling applications to connect to numerous storage systems through a common interface. The software is published under the Apache License.
Kyndryl Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational information technology infrastructure services provider. Headquartered in New York City and created from the spin-off of IBM's infrastructure services business in 2021, the company designs, builds, manages and develops large-scale information systems. The company also has business advisory services. It is currently the world's largest IT infrastructure services provider, and the fifth-largest consulting provider.
Cilium is a cloud native technology for networking, observability, and security. It is based on the kernel technology eBPF, originally for better networking performance, and now leverages many additional features for different use cases. The core networking component has evolved from only providing a flat Layer 3 network for containers to including advanced networking features, like BGP and Service mesh, within a Kubernetes cluster, across multiple clusters, and connecting with the world outside Kubernetes. Hubble was created as the network observability component and Tetragon was later added for security observability and runtime enforcement. Cilium runs on Linux and is one of the first eBPF applications being ported to Microsoft Windows through the eBPF on Windows project.
