IBM Cloud Solutions Tutorials: Under Review for 2023

As this becomes a tradition, the team behind the looks look back and share their personal highlights from 2023.

Another year has passed. It felt like the whole world was talking about and trying out tools based on generative AI and large language models (LLMs). The kids get their homework done with ChatGPT, and the rest of us create images, PowerPoint slides, poems, code skeletons, and security hacks. IBM introduced watsonx as an AI and data platform built for business. And just this month, IBM and Meta launched the AI ​​Alliance with more than 50 founding members and collaborators. The goal is to advance open, secure, and responsible AI. It’s quite attractive.

Now let’s take a look at my personal highlights for 2023.

Frederick

AI – Last December, the topic surrounding AI was noticeable. AI began making waves in mid-November this year, and its impact is being felt in various aspects of our lives. From photo editing to email writing, AI has become an indispensable tool in a variety of environments. As we’ve seen it used with incredible efficiency in coding, travel planning, meeting preparation, user interface design, generating job interview questions, and social media posts, it’s clear that this technology will continue to evolve and become a more essential part of our daily lives. I’m living.

Platform engineering, internal development platform – Platform engineering is at the forefront of modern software development, driving innovation and collaboration across teams. By capturing best practices in reusable Terraform templates, engineering teams can streamline workflows, reduce errors, and increase productivity to deliver better software outcomes for users and accelerate time to market. This year, IBM Cloud introduced projects and deployable architecture. A project is a collection of named configurations used to manage related resources and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) deployments. Deployable architecture is cloud automation for deploying a common architectural pattern that combines one or more cloud resources designed for easy deployment, scalability, and modularity. It’s very easy to turn your Terraform templates into a deployable architecture and enable cost optimization, compliance management, self-service, standardization, and repeatability.

KubeCon – KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023 was held this year in my hometown of Chicago. This was my first time attending a conference, and it was amazing! It was truly amazing to see the Kubernetes ecosystem in action. The scale of what it can do is astounding. It’s amazing to think how one technology can support so many companies and create so many different job opportunities! As I explored many of the conference topics and toured vendors, I was impressed by many of the technologies. AI and internal development platforms were two highlights. Now it’s time to pick a few and try out the vendor products!

Powell

Platform engineering in hybrid cloud – While writing the case study, IBM Hybrid Cloud delivers value for reinvestment, manages compliance, and we were amazed by the breadth of applications IBM creates and supports to manage the business. Extending the CIO’s office’s dedicated data center to the IBM public cloud allowed us to experiment and grow without risk. This platform supports the global footprint for disaster recovery (DR). Red Hat OpenShift. Application templates with guardrails ensure that daily operations, fixes, and security patches are continuously delivered.

Transit VPC with VPN – The hub and spoke model allows communications to pass through a firewall router using off-the-shelf equipment. There is a two-part tutorial (Part 1 and Part 2) that explains the architecture. Terraform automation and automated regression testing allowed us to reliably change the connection mechanism from direct link to VPN. The blog post “How to use VPN in a VPC hub-and-spoke architecture” describes the project. Automated regression testing is dynamite.

VPC custom image – Some workloads are best captured in VPC virtual machines. Baking your application to a virtual machine image is a simple way to roll out software. You can use IBM’s image as a starting point or bring your own cloud-init image to IBM Cloud. To gain insight into IBM Cloud’s VPC image support, read Creating and deploying VPC custom images.

Dimitri

blog post – Adding instance storage to an existing VPC VSI describes the process you follow to update an existing virtual server instance (VSI) and add instance storage. This is made possible by enabling the ability to preserve and reuse boot volumes when a VSI is deleted.

Using event notifications in a deployed solution covered using the infrastructure as a code template to set up and configure services and automatically route service notifications to SMS, email, or object storage destinations. The team developing this service recently added the ability to customize the emails sent. This has been greatly improved as you can now suggest actions to the recipient based on captured events.

certification – I worked with a talented team of subject matter experts to revamp the IBM Certified Professional Developer learning plan. The plan’s courses focus on services relevant to developers building applications on the IBM Cloud platform and prepare them for certification exams that can now be taken online through Pearson Vue. Make sure getting certified is still on your to-do list for the year. If you’re interested in other roles, such as Architect, SRE, etc., you can also take a look at the IBM Training page for a full list of learning plans and certifications.

Henrik

Db2 and IDUG Anniversary – happy birthday, DB2! And happy birthday, International Db2 User Group (IDUG)! IBM Db2 for z/OS celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. IBM Db2 was released in June 1983. Five years later, IDUG was born. And another five years later, 30 years ago, IBM Db2 (for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, LUW) was released to the public.

As a former user, later developer, administrator, technical facilitator, lab advocate and IBM liaison to the IDUG EMEA Conference Planning Committee (CPC), I was fortunate and happy to meet and celebrate many Db2 users at IDUG 2023 EMEA over the years. Db2 Tech Conference and other events in Prague, Czech Republic.

Cloud Security – How do you evaluate the adoption of security features to protect your cloud accounts and managed resources? Have you used our service to assess the security posture of your account? I try to follow cloud and data security news and find interesting things about what security features have been added and how attacks have changed at the same time (looking back, there is nothing new…).

Over the past year, we’ve started using situation-based limits to free up more resources. Access is then restricted to configured service instances or specific network areas and addresses. Additionally, for some resources, we added time-based conditions to restrict access to specific hours or days (such as workshops or hackathons). Another security feature is trusted profiles. Authentication can be done without an API key or password, but based on other well-defined criteria, such as specific compute resources (virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and namespaces). A new tutorial, Trusted Profiles for Secure Cloud Environments, discusses technical details and guides you through steps to enhance security.

There was much more on the security side. I wrote two blog posts about organizing accounts. The first was how to clean up unused access policies. The other discussed automatic processing of detected inactive IDs. In terms of assessing the security posture of your account, the IBM Cloud Security and Compliance Center (SCC) has added several new features. As a German and European, I especially like the new support for the BSI C5:2020 security profile.

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If you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post, follow us on Twitter:@data_henrik, @powellquiring) or LinkedIn (Dimitri, Frederic, Henrik, Powell). Use the buttons in individual tutorials to open a documentation issue and provide suggestions. You can also open a GitHub issue on the code sample for clarification.

We’d love to hear from you and welcome you back as a reader in 2024.

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