IBM Cloud

With more than half and eye on the growing complexity of not just existing cloud service environments but the extension that edge computing will being to them, IBM does look to be focusing on offering customers strong ‘how to’ hand-holding services to existing and new customers when it comes to adopting edge computing.

According to IBM, it has seen the core shift that is now happening as being a change from the mobile internet era to a world of hyper-connectivity, an evolution it sees being accelerated by demand from enterprise users for greater digital transformation. The mobile internet era was about mobile connection to internet and simply consuming content. The hyper-connected era is about digital intersecting with every aspect of its customers business operations and, through them, everyone’s physical lives.

It is about providing a cloud service capability that mimics the physical interactions that we have every day by using digital solutions. IBM sees this inevitably leading to new ecosystems and partnerships that bring all these different aspects of technology, business and services together in order to drive and exploit the levels of hyper-connectivity now available.

The starting point of the ‘how to’ hand-holding operations is the company’s methodology called Garage. This brings together a small group of domain experts from the customer company, the service providers and a sponsor from the IBM line of business, to work together over a two-to-three-month period to learn how to develop new services and applications by working through well-targeted examples.

The goal is to produce the minimum viable, deployable service that can be delivered to stand alone at the end of that period, before moving on. The collected results of this process will be able to work together across both the edge and data center as different parts of exactly the same Software Defined Network.

Quotes

“The hyper-connected era is about digital intersecting with every aspect of its customers business operations and, through them, everyone’s physical lives.”

“The important aspect here is that IBM Cloud comes with the expertise and experience of working with both its own edge related capabilities but also with other specialist technology and knowledge providers.”

The key factor is that the edge and the cloud share a lot in common in terms of development practices, containerisation, separation, loose coupling, continuous integration and delivery processes, DevOps, and Agile development practices. However, there are also fundamental differences, particularly because the edge tends to be much more diverse, with much more variation in the underlying compute architecture, configurations, purpose, and locations where edge computing is being performed. Edge services are much more dynamic and changeable, with systems reconfiguring
and changing purpose. In short, according to the company, it is at least an order of magnitude more complex.

Also, unlike the cloud where one is dealing with a few variations on the Intel x/86 processor architecture, the edge consists of a far wider variety of devices. Increasingly, they are also all going to be connected and come with enough memory and CPU power to conduct at least a small amount of in-situ processing, even if that is not required at the moment. The challenge here, therefore, is achieving a usable level of integration between such disparate devices. To help customers achieve this, IBM Cloud has already formed a partnership with Mimik Technology.

The company is therefore pitching its cloud services capabilities as the underlying tool with which to build and deliver these capabilities, the Software Defined Networking capabilities that can reach down to the widest, farthest and smallest corners of a company’s overall network architecture and up to the highest levels of business management. This capability can therefore be delivered by IBM in its entirely, as the sole provider of all aspects of the cloud service, or the company can deliver part of an overall, hybrid solution where, for example, the edge computing capabilities are an additional service to network topology a customer is already using.

The important aspect here is that IBM Cloud comes with the expertise and experience of working with both its own edge related capabilities but also with other specialist technology and knowledge providers. It can, therefore provide new customers with a space in which they can experiment with small-scale edge computing developments that not only provide learning for a customer’s development teams but also a working service that can provide observable benefits.

It is easy to assume that a cloud service is a cloud service is a cloud service, and at first look that can be a reasonable assumption, especially when it comes to businesses that have no requirement to `push the envelope’ of operations requirements in any direction at all. Look deeper, however and differences in service provisions and capabilities may prove to be vital. For example, not all will be able to work effectively in an edge computing environment. They will be able to work with such a service, not provide it satisfactorily.

Edge computing is still very much in its early developmental stages, and it has to be observed that it is already one of the new phrases in the lexicon of technology vendor marketing personnel. There are increasing examples of such vendors now talking up their ‘edge-capable’ credentials, quite often with little direct evidence that established, even legacy, products are entirely suitable for the work a user may be hoping they will match. Without experience and prior knowledge it becomes far too easy for new users to trap themselves down unsuitable, often blind alleys, and then press onward in the hope that the investments already made will somehow bear fruit.

With that in mind the experience and expertise that underpins IBM Cloud, which includes that generated by many years of developing and running major industrial and commercial projects with IBM Global Services. Having that now available to those businesses looking to extend into edge computing, offers an opportunity to fast-track that development process, and bypass the many pitfalls that might otherwise entrap them.