IBM has launched a trio of new open source projects that aim to make it easier to develop and deploy applications in the cloud using Kubernetes: the Google-developed container orchestration platform that has emerged in its short life – it turned five in June – as the industry’s de facto standard.
Kubernetes is notoriously challenging for novices to deploy, and with the new releases –which stitch together an array of container-centric open source projects – IBM aims to reduce the infrastructure skill levels required to deploy containerised (portable across a range of environments) applications.
To do so, it is building heavily on top of Google-initiated (some, like Istio, with early IBM involvement) open source projects such as Tekton, along with Kubernetes itself; while weaving in its own tools such as Razee.
Primus inter pares of the three is IBM Kabanero.
This is built around (Kubernetes extension, service mesh and continuous integration tools) Knative, Istio, and Tekton, with new open projects Codewind, Appsody, and Razee and includes pre-configured templates for open source runtimes, extensions to integrated development environments, and CI/CD tooling for Kubernetes clusters.
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The move (which no doubt aims to burnish IBM’s open source credentials and showcase its development chops post-Red Hat acquisition, as well as offer up some genuinely useful tools to the community) comes as the company says its Kubernetes Service (IKS) has become one of the fastest-growing and “most critical” services in IBM Cloud with “thousands” of clusters under management.
Nate Ziemann, Senior Product Manager, IBM Cloud, Developer Technologies, described Kabanero as “lowering the barrier of entry” to developing and deploying cloud-native applications. He said: “With Kabanero, you don’t need to spend time mastering DevOps practices and Kubernetes infrastructure topics like networking, ingress, and security.
“Instead, Kabanero integrates the runtimes and frameworks that you already know and use (Node.js, Java, Swift) with a Kubernetes-native DevOps toolchain. Our pre-built deployments to Kubernetes and Knative (using Operators and Helm charts) are built on best practices. So, developers can spend more time developing scalable applications and less time understanding infrastructure.”
The others include Appsody: pre-configured stacks and templates for open source runtimes and frameworks for Kubernetes and Knative deployments, and Codewind, which provides extensions to integrated development environments (IDEs) like VS Code, Eclipse, and Eclipse Che (with more planned).This lets developers rapidly iterate, debug, and performance test apps inside containers, just like when they run in production.
IBM concurrently announced a new “Data Asset eXchange” (DAX) that will function as an online hub for developers and data scientists to find “carefully curated” free and open datasets under open data licenses.
IBM says it is primarily hoping to share datasets made available under the Linux Foundation’s Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) open data licensing framework to enable data sharing and collaboration. DAX will also provide “unique access” to various IBM and IBM Research datasets.
IBM plans to publish new datasets on the Data Asset eXchange regularly, it said.
