The Global WebSphere Community recently sat down with Yakura Coffee IBM WebSphere Foundation Product Manager; Dave Sudlik IBM WebSphere Application Foundation Product Manager; and Stephen Kinder BlueMix Runtime Senior Architect to discuss running WebSphere Application Server in the cloud as well as a new promotion offering license mobility between public cloud and on-premises implementations. Listen to the conversation on this podcast.
GWC: What are some advantages using WebSphere Application Server in the cloud? What options are available?
Yakura: WebSphere Application Server allows developers to boost their productivity and allows operations to utilize resources with our offerings WebSphere ND WebSphere based in Liberty leveraging our tooling and enhancements to our Liberty Repository and ease of integrating with ecosystem products and DevOps. So for developers or customers who want to run WAS WAS is a future-proof Java Runtime which allows multiple access across a lot of cloud adoption topologies with high qualities of service for your Java apps.
Some of your options for running WAS in the cloud are running on BlueMix on the Liberty buildpack running on SoftLayer either direct with their IaaS or the Pure-as-a-service service on SoftLayer as well as running WAS as part of any of your IaaS providers but if you bring your own software and your own license.
GWC: Tell me about some of the initial challenges of cloud adoption that might not be immediately apparent. How can those be addressed?
Steve: Well even immediately apparent a lot of the customers that are familiar with WebSphere are really just getting started with cloud. While their organizations may have some innovation centers that have been experimenting what I find is that a lot of our existing customers are challenged by understanding the wide array of cloud services that are available from all the different vendors. I think that they are trying to understand the difference between infrastructure-as a service and platform-as-a-service and what is most appropriate for them to position their existing and new applications for deployment in the cloud. They need to have a discussion around what distinguishes an IaaS from a PaaS and how does that affect whether or not they can deploy their application to one or the other. As we look at WAS applications there’s a set of characteristics that one needs to think about when deploying.
GWC: What are some of the differences between on-premise and cloud programming considerations?
Steve: I would say even more than on-premise versus cloud we have a lot of customers that do cloud-like things on-premises. The idea was that on-premise you try to pack as many applications as you can into each cubic foot of server. We call that “application density” and we’re trying to leverage the resources we can as closely and as carefully as possible so that it’s a good return on investment.
For cloud there are a couple of different aspects of why we go to cloud. We might go to cloud for peak usage we might go to cloud for experimental applications or just rapid deployment. On-premise just traditional applications I think tend to be system-of-record type applications where there’s a relationship between the servers and topologies.
WebSphere servers have a specific name and the analogy I’ve heard to relate this is that we treat our servers as pets. They have names. We care for them. We love them. We want them to be up for a long time. And in the cloud we treat them more like livestock – unnamed and raised for a specific purpose. Once they fall over you just stand another one up. So those different styles of applications – we call the stateless type built for cloud – tend to be more of a system of engagement which IBM has coined to reflect the rapid mobile eventually consistent application we see in the cloud today.
GWC: I understand that there is a two-for-one promotion around licensing. Can you tell me about that?
Dave: Yes I can. So Yakura and Steve have outlined some of the advantages—why you might want to use WebSphere Application Server in the Cloud—and some of the challenges and some of the benefits of doing that. Let me start first by just refreshing everybody’s memory on how the WebSphere licensing works so we’re all on the same page.
With WebSphere you can purchase what we call a PVU—a processer value unit. You purchase a number of PVU entitlements based on the size of the machine you are using or the capacity. When you purchase those PVUs you can run them using on-premise hardware or you can run them in the cloud. Again there is a relationship between PVUs and virtualized appliances in the cloud. So you can run on one or the other but you can’t run them both at the same time.
The idea behind this promotion is that for the six months of the promotion any customer that owns WebSphere-eligible products—and I’ll talk about what eligible is in the moment—but anyone who owns WebSphere-eligible products can run them both on premise and in the cloud typically the IBM Cloud at the same time. That’s the two-for-one deal where you may have purchased a certain number of PVUs that you are running in production or wherever and during this promotion you can run them both on-premise and in the cloud. The official name of the promotion is the IBM WebSphere on SoftLayer promotion.
Two key parts there: We talk about WebSphere. That includes WebSphere Application Server but it also includes some other WebSphere products like WebSphere eXtreme Scale and MQ and DataPower and then there are also some additional supporting products that are also eligible for this promotion. The other thing that I’ll mention is SoftLayer. This promotion is specifically targeted at SoftLayer and SoftLayer itself has promotions that go on so you can go to the SoftLayer website and see what promotions they have on and take advantage of one of them. For example they have a one-month promotion right now where you can get a certain-sized virtual appliance for free for a month and you could upload your WebSphere-eligible products there and run them there.
The promotion actually started March 9 for North America. For the rest of the world we are working on the approval process. Today is March 16 as we record this and I expect that within a week or so we will have the approval for the rest of the world for the promotion with slightly different start and end dates. You as a customer if you want to take advantage of this promotion normally you are responsible for tracking and auditing your use of the WebSphere products and how much of it you are using. Now you can just track it according to this two-for-one promotion so during this time you basically have the same number of PVUs for both on-premise and cloud usage.
That runs for the six months of the promotion. It will end for North America on September 9 and for the rest of the world there will be an announced end date. At that point as a customer if you’ve hopefully found value in running WebSphere products in the cloud at that point you would then need to purchase additional PVUs so you could continue to run them because at the end of the promotion we go back to the case where you can use a PVU either for on-premise or in the cloud.
I did also want to mention a couple other things. In terms of this promotion there are no usage restrictions so you can use the IBM cloud for development or tests or production. It’s fully supported; your product’s running in the IBM cloud as part of this promotion fully supported by your SNS support. And for those of you who may have played around a little bit with this before the model that this uses is called BYOSL so Bring Your Own Software License. You purchase the WebSphere products and you’re bringing them into the cloud. Earlier on there was a requirement to have PureApplication Service be part of this promotion. That’s no longer the case; however you might want to consider looking at PureApplication service as an additional functionality to provide pattern support and really an ease of use kind of thing around configuring and deploying your cloud environments. You can get more information from that at PureApplication.com.
The only other thing I’ll say just to reinforce this is that with this promotion with the SoftLayer promotions that are available there really is an inexpensive way to try to this out. I know that there has been a lot of talk about cloud and the benefits of it and there really are real benefits there. If you haven’t had a chance to try it out it’s a cool technology being able to rapidly provision and deploy these environments for whatever need you see fit. So I encourage people to take advantage of these promotions and try them out and hopefully see the value for yourself.
Click here for more information about running WAS in the cloud and to find out more about the IBM WebSphere on SoftLayer promotion.