Cloud Platform as a Service

For the month of September we would like to announce the following new customer facing features:

Simplified cluster upgrading through Worker Pool OS Modification

• Users can now streamline the cluster upgrading process through the worker pool OS modification feature.

• Previously to upgrade the OS of a cluster users had to provision a new worker pool with the new OS, add worker nodes to the new worker pool and migrate  workloads over, and shutoff old worker nodes/pools slowly which caused additional planning and incurred duplicate costs.

• With the worker pool OS modification feature, users can now simply select the worker pool they wish to upgrade and we take care of the OS upgrade. No additional workers, no additional infrastructure cost!

GX3D (Nvidia H100 GPUs) flavors GA

• IBM is thrilled to announce that the Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPU is generally available for IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS) and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud (ROKS)

• H100 enables organizations to train and deploy the largest and most complex AI models, while boasting incredible performance. NVIDIA H100 GPUs are up to 6x faster chip-to-chip compared to A100. We’ve found that switching from A100 GPUs to H100 GPUs experience up to 30x speed improvements and up to 9x speed improvements in AI inferencing and AI training, respectively. 

• To read more, visit the blog here.

SCC Workload Protect Integration

• IT admins can now enable compliance monitoring for IBM Kubernetes and ROKS clusters at cluster provisioning time without manual setup

OpenShift 4.16 GA

• RedHat OpenShift on IBM Cloud customers can now provision or upgrade their OpenShift clusters to OpenShift 4.16 includes numerous components and updates that our community is excited about including:

• Reduced unauthenticated access for users or groups

• Easier OpenShift update troubleshooting with oc adm upgrade status

• Boost your cluster observability with advanced monitoring and troubleshooting

• To read more, visit the blog here

IKS 1.31 GA

• IKS customers can now provision or upgrade their clusters to IKS 1.31! IKS 1.31 highlights include:

• Traffic distribution for services - moves to beta and is enabled by default. This feature enables users to configure how Kubernetes handles traffic routing.

• Improved ingress connectivity reliability for kube-proxy - now includes logic that performs connection draining for terminating worker nodes exposed by services

• Support for Calico API server

• Ubuntu 24 is now default operating system

• To read more, visit the blog here