Delivery Benefits of IBM Cloud for Skytap
A) What is Skytap
B) IBM Cloud for Skytap Solutions [ICSS]
C) Experience as a developer on a team using Skytap
D) IBM Cloud for Skytap — Free Trial and Documentation links
What business priorities can IBM Cloud for Skytap solution assist?
- Modernizing Legacy Architectures
- Dev/Test, Delivery
- DevOps /Agile teamwork
- Continuous Integration
- Training and Demos
What is Skytap
So, Skytap is a private company headquartered in Seattle that offers application services for cloud automation and VM management, development, and testing. IBM partners with Skytap to make the solution provided even more powerful with IBM Cloud’s infrastructure (IaaS). If you used Illumita VM management in 2006–08, Skytap was called Illumita back then.
Skytap gives Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS) to accelerate the software development lifecycle and enable clients to test and deliver better software with speed.
Built for agile collaboration, clients utilize Skytap to create, copy, manage, oversee, share and control per start/suspend/stop their usage with configured environments at each stage of the cycle, without the expenses and postponements connected with manual setup and provisioning.
This is made so that distributed teams can develop and test in parallel and ensure quality at every part of the lifecycle, and avoid days or weeks of time in setup and configuration.
The partnership between IBM and Skytap is only growing, as Skytap also announced in 2018 that they will be integrating with native services from IBM Cloud. Skytap will also be presenting at IBM THINK in 2018.
IBM Cloud for Skytap Solutions [ICSS]
So what does IBM bring to Skytap?
Infrastructure support per the time-to-delivery Skytap provides.
Delivered on the IBM Cloud Infrastructure platform [formerly called Softlayer], hosted in US and UK, this ICSS offers advanced enterprise-grade security, global reach and scalability.
IBM Cloud for Skytap Solutions is the first cloud solution that enables IT to rapidly migrate, develop, and deploy AIX workloads running on Power Systems side-by-side with Linux workloads, also delivering support for Windows, Linux, and Solaris in multitenant and dedicated regions. IBM Cloud for Skytap Solutions enables end-users to templatize and replicate their own blended environments in seconds, while IT maintains access controls and governs usage. — IBM
Skytap Cloud and IBM Cloud for Skytap Solutions are the only public cloud offerings to support AIX, Linux, and Windows operating systems altogether.
IBM Cloud for Skytap Solutions [ICSS] provides:
1. Native Support for VMware and AIX
IBM Cloud for Skytap supports the VMware ESX and IBM PowerVM hypervisors. As the first and only public cloud to support AIX workloads alongside x86 workloads, Skytap Cloud (this is delivered by IBM as IBM Cloud for Skytap Solutions) makes it feasible for enterprises to quickly migrate AIX applications to the cloud and accelerate application delivery and modernization.
2. Complex Application Environments
The foundation of ICSS is an environment that combines not only the hardware images, but configurations of servers, appliances, network and domain settings, data and virtual assets that can span multiple cloud instances as well. So think of the applications, infrastructure, networking, operating system, middleware, storage, and memory state into a sole replicable unit and you have this environment. More details below.
3. Software-Defined Networking
ICSS environments support Layer 2 and 3 networking and offer secure NAT and VPN connections to other clouds and external, on-premises environments.
4. Templates
Configure an environment once, then save as a read-only template. This is literally the coolest thing in the entire world. When I did not have pressing deadlines, I would shop the templates I had access to replicate for projects (I was in presales, this was fun) at several times because it was so cool and exciting to know I could use these pre-made templates of different configs for free that were also cognitive projects. Templates are managed by IT and can be accessed on-demand by development teams, this reduces provisioning times.
5. Cloning
IBM Cloud for Skytap environments can be replicated in their entirety, including Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking and memory state. Basically think of an environment being replicated in a few minutes. Cloning accelerates replication and reset times and eliminates config drift.
6. Suspend and Auto-Suspend
Suspend working environments for short-term cost reduction or long-term cold storage. Set timed suspends of resources to reduce idle infrastructure and associated costs. I preferred “Off” but right before a string of presentations, or when micro-developing between calls, suspend worked.
7. Role-Based Access and Quota
Set access and control quotas at the region, department, and user level.
8. Pre-Built Integrations
Integrate with your existing DevOps and CI/CD tools including Puppet, Chef, Jenkins, MS TFS, IBM UrbanCode and many more. Documentation and Skytap can say it better than I can, so I give a snippet below plus the link per this description. The details on the REST API by Skytap that you can utilize are in the following section.
9. Container Management & Frameworks
Gives you visibility and control over containers. You can use this with the same cloning, suspending, on/off of other applications and workloads on Skytap. This is all contained within this solution, no pun intended, through Skytaps’s Container Management which integrates container tooling and allows the management of containers side by side with traditional components. There is agnostic support for container management and orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesosphere, and more.
Experience as a developer on a team using Skytap
1. Troubleshooting + Collaboration
The reason I started with Skytap was because I was a Solutions Engineer in charge of delivering PoC’s to companies using their own data via the Watson Explorer [behemoth] application tied with the Watson services on IBM Cloud Platform [formerly deemed Bluemix].
So I constructed this show of a realm of services instantiated on IBM’s cloud platform that I showcased by graphical interface I customized per client on Watson Explorer [AppBuilder], and I usually necessitated configs of Watson Explorer crawlers, this depended on the application architectures really.
But these demos were composed of not one application, but several applications. So one PoC was a dashboard of several applications I stood up utilizing client information or by crawling client use-case necessary data altogether.
I started setting Watson Explorer up on my Linux machine [RH]. I did it. It worked. I then encountered a few errors every once in a while that were crippling.
So I contacted some Cognitive Architects about “how to do this” and “why is this occurring”. Though this was more intense, since I had four day deadlines on these projects.
They said “Which environment is it on Skytap?” Then when they realized I was setting this application Watson Explorer up bare metal they said:
“No, you should not do that bare metal because you can get all these weird errors and nobody can know why they exist unless we are on your machine and know your set-up, whereas the Skytap environment you should be using is done by a template everyone on the team starts with and uses, and thus we can troubleshoot the errors we have as a team a lot easier and faster by accessing [per given access permissions] each others’ environments.”
So I got added to the team.
If you need to build a template and you need like say, 80 copies of that template tomorrow or in five minutes, IBM Cloud for Skytap supports this.
On this point, I can say that people would rather replicate an environment that has a bug or general issue within the environment to show to others than have people go through all the steps to reproducing the issue in another working environment. This saves time. Saving time saves money. This leads to my next point.
2. Time is Money.
A bit about me, I have my Bachelors in Finance. This schooling translated into my life in my thinking of budgeting as a competitive sport.
I go through several minutes of my day thinking through different respects to cut costs per my daily habits. It is my last thought before bed at night. It makes or breaks how I feel about my day. Want to ruin my day? Tell me I have to pay over $40 bucks for something of little value out of pocket.
On occasion, my sport becomes a benign fiasco in the name of cutting daily expenditures, such as eating oatmeal across months. Important or necessary expenses, I can qualify the spending. It’s the pesky daily expenditures that I am strident on.
The short is, guys have really enjoyed taking me to dinner through the years.
Bringing this full circle, time is money in this case rather than oatmeal. Your teams can get to being siloed or delivery slows for X reasons. Everybody that actually can see and understand this at the macro level gets strained by knowing this is happening per the bottom line.
Development as a necessary expense can do some damage by that cost of time or certain scenarios become irritating and eat time.
Developers can also go have fun with all that freedom they have per cloud services since its a team resource. Its like when you have a get-together and a pizza delivery, everybody at that gathering will think the pizza is endless in supply since the tops of the pizza boxes are closed until someone opens the pizza boxes to see how much there is. Some developers do not really see downstream in this regard and might keep resources on too long, not limit API calls, etc.
Pre-conditional thinking is needed per thoughts on environment, access control, and security. Without that, it can makes some of the Leads, PM’s, and C-suite’s faces turn red as tomato sauce to consider these points after hits have already been taken to the bottom line. This is another area where Skytap can be beneficial. Turning things off.
3. You can turn Off your usage. Its not just On constantly.
The fact that I could turn off my environments by myself when I was not using them in Skytap took that burden of not knowing the costs while I developed.
I was in control of the start and stop of my actions in Skytap more than I wasn’t in control. Even when it was not linked to my credit card [since it was for my company], it was comforting. With how much developers have or can experiment with cloud services, this may be a comfort to others to know they have control and everything is easy to find on the interface per your levels of control.
The way this worked out for me is the email alerts really.
4. Email alerts across threshold and time
When I was being an imperfect human in forgetting to turn off my environment after hard work or demos, I had multiple email alerts that reminded me after a few hours of “Hey, did you mean to leave this on?”, “This has been on for like two weeks…Did you mean to do that..”, and the like.
I did not have to worry about a Technical Lead or Project Manager, or any admin calling my manager with “Julia used in the past month about 4K per her developments in her environments….Can you explain this?” which I dreaded when using any services shared by a team.
That has to be on a list of “Ways to Get Fired from an IT company”. Spend an unapproved amount of ~10K on constructing a single demo using client data for one company that is not really reusable as an asset whatsoever to anyone.
I never did that, but I would be hiding from life for a few days if I did.
To conclude, this is why the “I can turn this off” and the notification features were pretty fundamental in my love of this solution and overwhelmingly important to me, being the new Solutions Engineer on the block.
5. Ease of Use
I was added to the team and had my account on Skytap. I authenticated and accessed my Skytap dashboard, and saw a string of videos in my dashboard.
You don’t have to do a “go find” for learning how to use it on Youtube. I watched the videos. They were solid videos that were I think less than 5 minutes. I got going in no time with this VM management. I have never heard a developer complain about Skytap and I think that is a testament to the ease of use.
6. Skytap Cloud REST API
Any developer will recognize the significance of this, in the link from the source here is the ‘Getting Started’ guide to using the REST API.
The Skytap Cloud REST API is provided as a Web Services API. The Skytap Cloud API supports automation of a few core use cases, including:
Creating and editing environments, templates, and their components;
Starting, suspending, or shutting down virtual machines;
Providing access to virtual machines through networks and sets of URIs;
Identifying the status and usage of machines and resources.
TLDR, I like using Skytap due to being able to…
- Spin up in minutes, like 5 minutes.
- Set multiple stages of alerts per running environments and more.
- Shut off the VM when you don’t need it.
- Copy and clone templates in minutes.
- Team collaboration and troubleshooting is easy.
- Skytap API
Further Information on IBM Cloud for Skytap
If you would like to know more, here are some great links to resources!
IBM Cloud for Skytap Documentation
Free Trial Link for 1 Month, 25 GB of memory
IBM Cloud for Skytap Solutions Video
Hope you enjoyed this article, let me know if you have any questions!! ❤ Julia
