IBM has a vision for the marriage of containers, apps, and functions—driven by Kubernetes, Istio, and the emergence of Knative—into a single combined and unified container application platform.

Open standards can be critical as the market continues to shift to the era of hybrid and multicloud environments, where portability of workloads and no vendor lock-in are essential to the success of every business.

Have you ever asked the question: “Which do I use—Cloud Foundry or Kubernetes?” Your choice will be based on trade-offs in performance, control, and flexibility as you consider how to build your app. Cloud-native developers today have to decide between three separate container platforms and a plethora of database options. For applications, some choose the flexibility of containers with IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, others the velocity of an opinionated platform like IBM Cloud Foundry (CF), and still others believe the future is all about serverless with IBM Cloud Functions (CFn). For data persistence, some choose the relational semantics of Databases for PostgreSQL, while others leverage the scalability and ease-of-use of NoSQL data stores like Cloudant and Elasticsearch.

IBM has a vision for the marriage of containers, apps, and functions—driven by Kubernetes, Istio, and the emergence of Knative—into a single combined and unified container application platform. Coupled with powerful database technologies, it’s time to break down the silos and see how these projects’ paths are converging to solve real microservices dilemmas: security, scale, and operations.

Introducing Managed Istio and Managed Knative on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

With the goal of ubiquitous Kubernetes, IBM introduced IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service in May 2017 to simplify operations and bring solutions to the market faster. Now, with IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service 1.13, IBM is introducing two optional cloud-managed services and capabilities designed to enable clients to quickly build and deploy enterprise-scale container-based applications across hybrid environments.

• Managed Istio on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service: With each new microservice added to your architecture, the complexity of deploying, operationalizing, and troubleshooting can increase. An open-source service mesh like Istio can provide great insights, but it adds one more component in the stack. Managed Istio on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides seamless installation, automatic updates, and lifecycle management of the Istio components and out-of-the-box integration with platform logging and monitoring tools. Add the Managed Istio integration to your new or existing clusters via the UI or CLI to gather deep visibility and insights into running services, perform traffic management such as canary deployments, enforce policies, encryption between services, and more. Managed Istio is a beta management service for Istio 1.0, which was released in July 2018. Learn more about Managed Istio on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.

• Managed Knative on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service: Cloud-native architectures can be complex, with a range of compute choices powering various components. Managed Knative on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service delivers a new way to manage your Kubernetes-based applications by providing a new set of architectural components, influenced by serverless computing requirements. Additionally, it integrates the ability to define build pipelines and event orchestration for a more loosely coupled event-driven application. We believe that Knative could provide the basis for a unification of cloud-native application infrastructure—spanning Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, and serverless. This is all being introduced with the goal of allowing developers to focus on what they do best: innovate. A preview of the Knative technology is available through the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service user interface and through a command line option. Learn more about Managed Knative on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.

The IBM Cloud Databases portfolio

In addition to the services outlined above, the release of the IBM Cloud Databases portfolio provides developers with popular, market-leading database technologies that allow them to focus on building applications rather than managing databases.

• IBM Cloud Databases: These services are fully managed, highly available, and built from the ground up with enterprise security in mind. The databases are designed for scalability and cost-efficiency and are readily usable for enterprise application development. Natively integrated and available in the IBM Cloud console, these databases are now available through a consistent consumption, pricing, and interaction model. The IBM Cloud Databases family is available now and provides a unified experience for developers that includes access control, backup orchestration, encryption key management, and auditing. IBM Cloud Databases supports PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, RabbitMQ, and etcd.

• IBM Cloud Databases for MongoDB: IBM has recently completed an agreement with MongoDB Inc. that will allow us to provide MongoDB-as-a-service to customers on the IBM Cloud so that customers can now get the power of the IBM Cloud Database platform with features such as a serverless scaling API, bring-your-own-encryption key, and deep integrations with key IBM Cloud services. This product will become Generally Available in Q1 and is currently in Private Preview.