Big Blue Banks on Cloud Computing for Developers

Everything can change in an instant. Whether it's thanks to an artist whose single has gone multi-platinum, an environmental disaster that requires massive real-time data modeling or a government portal that gives citizens the ability to collaborate with Washington, the demands on applications have never been greater. Today's world prizes novelty, true, but it also prizes scalability.

Imagine you're a developer tasked with building and testing a new, high-availability application across multiple platforms with manual tools. But this developer's lucky: You sign into IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, where you can see several instances already running, including details such as how many days each image has been running, its IP address and which OS provisioned. From this self-service UI, you can restart or delete instances. Or add a new one, select a data center and size, and build an application on top of IBM middleware. In a matter of minutes, your image is available and you can use the remote desktop client to access the server.

Why DIY Flies
According to IBM, enabling developers to serve themselves can reduce IT labor costs by 50 percent, reduce provision cycle times from weeks to minutes, and improve quality, eliminating software defects by up to 30 percent.

The multi-vendor, open cloud environment includes support for Linux, Java and J2EE, and allows clients to work with their own images as well as images from IBM. A complementary offering, IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing, includes custom image development and services for Rational software products and capabilities.

What makes this different from other cloud offerings? Big Blue's history as a software, services and infrastructure vendor, along with its open source community-building activities around Linux and Eclipse. In other words, IBM isn't going it alone: The goal is to offer stratospheric solutions with multiple partners in key areas. Here's a look at some of the innovative applications and services that are evolving in the cloud.

PC in the Pocket, Testing in the Air
In a mobile world of iPads and social media, all too often software testing plays catch-up to ever-proliferating devices, according to Tom Lounibos, founder and CEO of SOASTA.

"The cost of the test hardware, the software and the services themselves, or the traditional approaches — the testing over the past 15 years — have made it virtually impossible to effectively test Web site performance today," says Lounibos. What's more, "if you have an agile development environment, you really have to have an agile test environment to go along with it or it knocks out the agility on the development side."

That's why his company created Cloud Test: pay-as-you-go performance testing of both consumer facing and e-commerce Web applications and the platforms on which they're deployed. The core-intensive process requires "hundreds, if not thousands of servers to simulate the kinds of loads that we're seeing today."

Cloud Test can provision thousands of servers in a cloud from a cloud environment in "literally, six or seven minutes — to simulate millions of users hitting a Web site, whether they be TurboTax customers, Hallmark customers sending e-cards on Valentine's Day, or Zappos customers ordering shoes." If you're planning to build the next Zappos or want to know your global app will withstand a Chinese traffic surge or Indian updates, SOASTA Cloud Test is one of several services now running on IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud.

D.C.'s Idea-Driven Atmosphere
When the U.S. Department of Education — as part of the Obama Administration's open government policy — looked to build an open portal where teachers, students, and educational innovators could come together to improve the quality of public education in the United States, they turned to the Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI) in partnership with The Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations.

"We took over responsibility for developing, delivering and supporting the application in December 2009," says Evan Bauer, CTO of CSI. "By early January, we were working on the IBM data cloud and deploying our development instances there. We were in user test by late January. And by February, we were in production."

The Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations (innovation.ed.gov on the IBM Cloud) supports the $650 million education S3 fund, has had more than 100,000+ page views since its February launch, and has 2,500 registered users. Most importantly, the three-tiered, LAMP stack portal is configured for high availability: "We've been able to scale as we go. And we've built this to scale. IBM manages the network, the hardware, the hypervisor — but those virtual machines are ours once we configure them and select the model. We actually have root privilege on those machines. And that's actually a much cleaner handoff than the standard managed-hosting model for bringing up big systems and keeping them live 24/7."

CSI also took advantage of IBM tools to verify privacy protection and other quality assurance issues. That resulting level of confidence has sparked interest among other cabinet-level agencies, according to Bauer, "to open up government and have the American public participate in creating policy ideas."

PayPal Lifts Off
In the decade since an ambitious South African founded PayPal, the global payments and e-commerce company has, like Elon Musk (who now runs SpaceX), shown no interest in limiting its ambitions to Earth. The company is extending PayPalX into the cloud. The idea is not only to inspire innovation with PayPal on the IBM cloud, but to also quickly generate capital for new applications developed and made available via smart phones. "We look forward to seeing the payments innovations our developers create through the IBM cloud," says Osama Bedier, PayPal's vice president of platform and emerging technologies.

More than 10,000 downloads have been recorded for the PayPal image on the IBM Smart Business Development and Test Cloud, which can be used for future integration with PayPal SDKs and APIs. The image comes with sample apps, the PayPal Adaptive Payments and Accounts Java SDK, the Eclipse IDE and Tomcat connector. This allows developers to quickly create an instance on the IBM cloud, experiment with the sample apps, make code changes, or add new functionality to suit their business needs, according to Praveen Alavilli, technical evangelist for PayPalX.

Sample apps include a Preapproval Flight booking application and the Open Wallet application, which allows users to send money to their friends through PayPal. "As an example, this application can be added as a URL gadget (using iframes) to their profile pages on social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook or Yahoo! Application Platform," Alavilli blogs.

Hello, Nimbostratus: More Rain Makers
These are just a few examples of what is emerging from IBM's cloud ecosystem. Other newly announced partners include:

• WaveMaker — which provides WYSIWYG tools to create WebSphere applications running in the IBM cloud with no coding or systems administration knowledge required
  
  
• iTKO — which offers public and private cloud-based development environments
  
  
• Corent Technologies — which has developed service-oriented architecture solutions and techniques to provide a powerful framework for advancing SOA and SaaS initiatives
  
  
• Aviarc — which helps organizations develop custom, platform-independent applications with no need to worry about underlying technology choices
  
  
• RightScale and Kaavo — which help customers manage and provision cloud resources for effective app and workload deployment
  
  
• Navajo Systems — which implements security for cloud-based applications and Silanis' e-signature process management, for trustworthy transactions and contracts
  
  
• VMLogix — for manual, functional, and compatibility testing; and AppFirst for performance monitoring
  
  
• IBM Business Partner and IBM software delivery services beta participant Trinity Software, which helps federal agencies and clients that face complex IT administration scenarios and stiff compliance regulations

Big Blue's global commitment to the cloud is evidenced by several recent unveilings: an IBM cloud multipurpose center in Poland with an academic focus; a lab in Singapore to help governments, research institutions and businesses design and deploy cloud solutions; and a Cloud Competence Center in Germany. In keeping with the company's culture, the cloud environment is designed to be open in many ways: open in terms of standards, open globally, open to partner solutions and open to customers and universities.

More Resources

• Quick Look at the IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud
  
  
• Power Your Development and Testing Environment with Cloud Computing
  
  
• New to Cloud Computing Guide from developerWorks
  
  
• IBM developerWorks Cloud computing resources
  
  
• IBM Cloud computing resource library