An overview of IBM Cloud Paks and how these pre-integrated, containerized solutions can easily be deployed with IBM Schematics on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.

This combination of IBM services allows enterprises to build, manage, and modernize their cloud infrastructures faster and more securely.

With Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, you keep that familiar OpenShift experience while we manage the infrastructure, security, and scale. And with support for Cloud Paks, that experience is further streamlined, allowing you to install and start using Cloud Paks with the click of a button.

Learn more

• IBM Cloud Paks
• VIDEO – IBM Cloud Paks Explained
• Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud
• IBM Cloud Schematics
• Containers: An Essential Guide
• Containerization: An Essential Guide

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Why Cloud Paks on IBM Cloud?

Hi everyone, my name is Sai Vennam, and I’m with the IBM Cloud team. Today I’m excited to show off the all-new experience for using Cloud Paks on IBM Cloud. Let’s start with introducing Cloud Paks.

What are IBM Cloud Paks?

Essentially, Cloud Paks are containerized solutions created to help users not only create new cloud native applications, but also modernize existing workloads. 

Each IBM Cloud Pak includes IBM middleware and common services for development and operations, and all of this is on top of a common integration layer—OpenShift. 

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud

Cloud Paks are optimized to run on OpenShift—this means that Cloud Paks are supported wherever OpenShift is supported. On IBM Cloud, Cloud Paks support a streamlined deployment directly into OpenShift clusters.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud is a fully managed service. This means a number of things, like automated cluster provisioning, multi-zone regions for high availability, and integrations for logging and monitoring.

Creating an OpenShift cluster

First, we’ll need an OpenShift cluster, this is straightforward using our managed OpenShift service—an experience that I’ve detailed in our other videos.

Let’s take a look at my IBM Cloud dashboard.

Here, we can see that we’ve got an OpenShift cluster created and ready to go.

Push a Cloud Pak into the cluster with IBM Cloud Schematics

Next, we’ll need to push a Cloud Pak into this cluster. To do so, we’re going to take advantage of IBM Cloud Schematics, a completely free Terraform-as-a-Service infrastructure automation tool in IBM Cloud. 

Yep, that means you can use the community favorite open source Terraform to automate IBM Cloud infrastructure.

It starts with defining the infrastructure that you want a provision in a Terraform file. Then you’re able to verify that automation by generating a plan.

Finally, you apply that plan to start provisioning that defined infrastructure and software.

Schematics helps you manage this automation moving forward, allowing you to track those resources once you’ve created them and even make updates. And the best thing about Schematics—we can use it to install Cloud Paks.

Start with the IBM Cloud Catalog

Let’s see how this experience looks by first navigating into the catalog. The Catalog in IBM Cloud is actually core to the developer experience. Here we’ve got various compute options as well as services.

In addition, we have the all-new, easy-to-use Terraform templates as well as Cloud Paks, which we’ll start with now.

Demo: Cloud Pak for Data

We’ll start our demo with Cloud Pak for Data. This Cloud Pak allows you to manage multiple sources of data and then use AI to extract new insights.

First, we’ll need to verify that the OpenShift cluster that I showed you meets the sizing requirement. 

It does, so then we’ll customize that Schematics workspace and then run a pre-install script to set up our cluster.

We can even configure some of these variables and then start the install. 

Schematics manages our Terraform-based install of that Cloud Pak through every step of that install phase.

Once it’s completed, we can access our Cloud Pak for Data dashboard. That’s it, you’ve seen how easy it is to deploy a Cloud Pak into IBM Cloud.

Summary

Let’s summarize—with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, you keep that familiar OpenShift experience while we manage the infrastructure, security, and scale. And with support for Cloud Paks, that experience is further streamlined, allowing you to install and start using Cloud Paks with the click of a button.

Start building on the next-generation multicloud platform today, leveraging IBM Cloud Paks running on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.