“You Forgot Your WHAT!?!” – Business Trip Adventures

If I were to author a piece of fiction in the “Business Travel Adventures” genre, I still wouldn’t have “thickened the plot” with everything that I experienced in my last trip since the story would become “Fantastical Fantasy” genre… it would have seemed fake. 

But, it happened, and I needed to document this … who knows, it may become a pilot for a new reality show called “urban survivor”! 


On Monday, I was asked, last minute, to present, in person, to a client in NYC on Thursday. No problem. I’ve done this hundreds of times, even with short notice and I know my stuff. However, since this was only my second trip post Shutdown, I went through my travel list to mentally focus on everything I needed.

Laptop? check.  Toothbrush? check.   nice jeans/shirt? Check.  Hotel/Air/Presentation content?  Check. All set!

Wednesday morning, I was prepared. Then, I was asked to alter the presentation (slides and narrative), and that required additional time to prepare, but … no problem. The flight left at 3pm, and I had a client call at 1:30-2 so I drove up early to get all settled in a nice quiet corner of the airport so I could take that client call, with plenty of time spare to prepare to adjust my presentation.

I arrive at 12:40 with PLENTY of time…I drive to long-term parking …

…and my heart stopped. No.  screamed. Screamed as it fell 5000 feet into a dark, echoy chamber.

…I forgot my wallet. 

Sheer panic.

The ONE thing I NEVER forget! The ONE thing I tell my kids “don’t forget your wallet!” “You see kids, as long as you have your wallet you can solve most any troubling situation”.

Dammit!

I pulled into the “Arrival” curb just so I could think. I couldn’t think! I called my wife to talk it through. What could I do? I had no credit cards, no driver license, no cash, no vaccine card, nothing! We talked about her driving 1/2 way up and meeting me. No, I had that important client call. I couldn’t drive while presenting, and not enough time to get back.

Dammit! 

Think…think…think.

OK. Break down the problem. Can I do this without a wallet?

OK. Think…

OK, First, can you park? Yes, I can take a ticket to pay later. I have NO idea how to pay later, but that’s 3 days from now. Let’s worry about that in 2.5 days.

OK.  Second, what about the flight. Can you get through security?

…Think…and search…

AH! YES!  I still had my passport buried in my work backpack from January 2020 flight to Barcelona. I can use that to get through security.

OK. What about getting from LaGuardia to hotel? 

…Think…

My Phone!  I have Uber active and my corporate card attached. No credit card needed to drive.  In fact, I can Uber to the meeting and back to airport so I’m all good there.

OK. how about the Hotel? They require to see credit card in order to register.

Virtual Check-in!  My Hilton app lets me check in, get a digital key, and never even approach the hotel counter! 

Cool. Now you can fly there, transport, and get to hotel. You’re mostly there.

How will you eat?

…think…

ApplePay!  I’ve got my debit and Apple card set up so I just need to find a place that accepts ApplePay, or just eat the hotel and have it bill the room.

OK!  What about cash for paying for parking?  Not sure yet, let’s worry about that later.

SO… I parked, got through security, boarded the plane, hailed an Uber, got to hotel, and all was well!!!

Until…

I open the in-person invite that I was finally sent for the meeting in 9 hours.  “Dress code: Business Formal”.

Dammit! 

I packed my normal “look nice in a shirt and dark jeans”, but nothing close to business formal. I don’t even own a sport coat. But this new gig involves a lot of financial services companies. What should I do?

I SHOULD BUY A SPORT COAT!

Quick, call the wife to find out who in NYC sells sport coats AND accepts Apple Pay! (why call the wife? Because I’m not thinking clearly, I needed someone on this quest to think clearly and it clearly wasn’t me!)

Wife’s Answer? Macy’s!!!   …just added in July 2021. God Bless their Digital Transformation that I discussed with them back in 2015!

I changed into the shirt I planned to wear for the meeting, hiked over to Macy’s, and 45 minutes later, after debating about subtle colors, befriending a man who helped size me up, (I’m a 38R, who knew) I walked out with a decent sport coat that didn’t cost a crazy amount (but forever will be labeled as “I bought this from a boutique dealer in New York’s Fashion District!”)

OK. Now for a nice dinner so i can regain my focus! (but no drinks…gotta stay sharp, and i’m not thinking clearly already)

“No, we don’t”, is all I heard from hosts regarding “Do you take ApplePay?”. After a long search, I finally found Chipotle, who DID accept ApplePay, and I had a “to-go” meal (because I needed proof of vaccine to eat in the store) so I hiked back to the hotel. 

While eating, I loaded my phone with photos my wife sent of my Vaccine card, ID, and AmEx card. This turned out to be very useful, since only NY residents have access to the ‘official’ vaccine app, but I now have a password-protected Apple Note with Vax card and photo ID next to each other. It is the easiest way to prove I can sit and eat at a restaurant in NYC. Also while I was eating, we had a last-minute internal meeting where I was asked to change content for the presentation.

Next day, I Uber’d to the site, had a meeting I’ll never forget (not in a good way…but a topic for another blog), but did end the evening with a rich conversation with the client, as well as a fantastic steak meal, (with two decaf-espresso martini’s), and a long walk from 1st to 28th back to hotel.

Last quest? Find cash so I can pay for parking after I fly home tomorrow. Surely in a 35 minute walk through NYC I can find a way to get cash? Who should I call?

My wife!!   She says many ATMs take ApplePay via Debit Cards.  

OK! I have a debit card in my ApplePay! I try the first 5 ATM machines…

…Nothing. Debit only works for “bank owned” debit cards. Back to the wife. “I have a Wells Fargo debit you can use, and you can manually enter into ApplePay”.  I try, and it WORKS!

…except not at the Wells Fargo ATM  “Sorry, our systems are temporarily down”.

Dammit!!

How about this local drug store? “Do you give cash back?”. Response, “Only $10. How much you need?”, “About $80-100”.  “Um, No.”

OK.  Try more ATMs. Nothing.  I try to walk up to my Hotel front desk, “I lost my wallet…can you provide a cash advance from my card on file?”  “No.”

Dammit!

OK. …Think…  Ooooo! There’s a Rite Aid!  “Say, do you offer cash back with purchases?”,  “yes, but only $40”.  “OH!, can I buy 2 things to get to $80?”.  “Sure?”

And here I present to you two tins of ALTOIDS, which cost $43.25 EACH. (forever to be known as “The ALTOIDS maneuver”

But now, I have enough cash for exiting parking!!! …I think. I mean parking costs $22 per day. I couldn’t get the “use your credit card discount” option, and if they charge full days on partial usage, could I be charged more than $80? Don’t know. Don’t care anymore. I’m going home. If I get stuck, one of my two daughters who live in the Cities can bail me out.

I get back to the hotel, pack, Uber to airport, use my passport to get through security, buy lunch with ApplePay, fly home, get in the car, pull up to “Cash Only”, and…

…”that will be $58.00 please”

YES!

“Just curious, do you take Apple Pay?”

“No.”


I’m actually quite amazed at the success of this journey. But to be fully transparent, the toll it took on my “stay sharp and fully prepare for the client meeting” way-of-working was one reason the presentation was such a disaster (at least for me).  The other reasons? It’s not important.  I knew the constraints I was given, and I knew what it would take to prepare. What I didn’t plan on was how a simple brain blink (forgetting my wallet) could result in washing away all prep time (and adding cognitive poison to my usually sharp brain). Sure, I would have been a true “Rock Star” if I had pulled off a great client session given all this, but I wasn’t…at least this time. 

Is there a lesson for me? Many. I could fill up an entire chapter. For now I’ll summarize with this:

Think.  Prepare.  Practice.

Depend on Others.  Trust your Story. 

Risk is OK.  Failure will Happen.  

Trust your Skills.  Always Learn.  

Get Up! 

Travel to Japan – Tips (I hope to Re-Learn)

I simply adore Japan.

Dotonbori, Osaka at night

I traveled there twice for work in August and September 2019: One week in Tokyo, with a bullet train to Osaka, and a second trip to mostly Osaka. In late December 2019, I was asked to provide some tips to some folks that were going to travel there and were quite nervous.

I wrote the following blog post…and then a month later the Pandemic hit. Their trip got canceled, and my work travel halted and hasn’t resumed since. At the time I figured it wouldn’t be proper to post this.

Just this week, I re-read this, and wanted to post it anyway. It gives me hope that travel is soon on the horizon…and a glorious destination like Japan is something I long for.

Here are some tips I learned and I hope they help you.

Here we go!

Airport

If you’re anywhere close to Minneapolis, take the non-stop to Haneda. I’ve taken that exact route twice, and is quite nice. 12 hours…just enough time to watch a movie or two, have dinner, and sleep. AND, the airport is located in Tokyo so it’s a quick cab ride to your hotel, rather than long 1+ hour train ride from Narita.

I recommend you kick off your adventure properly and take the train straight from Haneda into the city for about 500 yen ($5 bucks). It’s fast, you’ll immerse yourself in the culture, and it forces you to learn how to work the train system 🙂

Of course the train only works well if you pack lightly. I highly recommend a backpack and a carry-on. International travel is so much easier that way. (and if you pick up souvenirs, just buy a dumpy little carry-on and check it in on the way home).

Funds

Cash

I usually travel with around $50 USD just to be safe. For Japan, I use ATM at the Haneda airport to get cash. I rarely get any country-specific cash in US before I leave. My bank cash card works great for that. (I also have a credit card I can get cash from…there is a fee to get cash from a credit card but in an emergency, it’s worth it. You’ll see a theme….I usually have 2 ways to do most anything so when one fails I have a backup).

$1 USD is around 100 Japanese Yen. So I get 20,000 yen (~$200 USD) to get by for local food/market. Of course you can always get more if you plan to buy things in smaller stores/markets.

Is there a fee? Sometimes. But, in the end, there are fees for everything so just plan to blow $10-$40 on various fees. (luggage, cash, card, etc). Travel isn’t cheap, but the fees are just a drop compared to flight costs so I just accept it and enjoy each moment!

Most stores in Japan all accept credit cards, but if you want to go somewhere small (or anywhere local like the fish market), or get a quick lunch at a Ramen shop, it’s cash.

Local market are cash only. But even here it’s hard to miss America’s influence

Credit Card

I use credit card all over (taxi, etc). just ask if they take it to ensure. The train system accepts card as well to pay for tickets.

Regarding international fees for credit cards. Some bank cards are dumb. In fact, most VISA’s are dumb in that they charge a fee for international purchases. EXCEPT the following:- Amazon Prime Visa. I use that all the time because it has zero international fees- Apple Card: I’ve started to use that physical card (and Apple Pay) because it’s zero international fees and tied right into my phone  (it’s my backup…always have a backup)

WiFi – Connectivity

I’ve traveled for work for quite some time (20+ years), and have been fortunate to explore 28 countries. Only in the last year have I had a phone plan that connects world-wide (and that’s only because work pays for it…i’m too stingy to pay for an international plan). In general, there’s enough wifi in airports and coffee shops to connect when you need. I used to practice a “buddy breathe” system, where I would get wifi, use Google Maps app and download map details to my phone in case I want to explore. I then put my phone in airplane mode, had more battery life, and still had maps. (I had my daughters do the same for their Europe adventure).

If you need connectivity, then I suggest the per-day. Some days you may need connectivity. I’ve never used the Pocket Wifi and may be great, but seems like another piece of tech to lug around.

One thing I truly enjoy is to feel disconnected. I love taking a long walk-about where I’m not having my phone buzz and blip as I explore a foreign land. It seems that these are the times I get the most joy out of these moments. Oh, and it gives me an excuse to buy a coffee to use a local wifi.

Part of the trick is just preparing. Arrange your travel from airport to hotel, use google maps on your phone and download for “offline” use, print out things on paper that you may need.

Which reminds me: Print out any hotel name or your important address in Japanese (the hotel/business web site will have info for you) so that if you need to get a taxi to take you somewhere you can just hand them in their local language.  I usually find the location on my phone map app and hand it to the driver…but even then, it’s in English and not many Japanese locals speak English.

Culture

Japan is a great culture. Everyone is kind and quiet. Therefore I try to be quiet. They drive on the “other side” of the roads, so when crossing streets ALWAYS look both ways. Cars will whip by next to the curb going “the wrong way” and can be quite surprising. For me I just wait for the crosswalk. Because of that, they also usually walk on the left, so first time I found myself walking the ‘wrong way’ as well…takes a while to remember, but just stay on your left. Also escalators. Stay on left because right side of escalator is “passing area” (same in Europe but opposite side 🙂  )

Toilets: Most us modern toilets but some are just holes. Adventures await!  If modern toilet, then it’s REALLY modern: heated, streams of water for cleaning, all kinds of craziness. Curious how it works? Give it a whirl!  You might be surprised how much you like them! I know a guy from US that loved Japanese toilets so much he spent 4K installing them at home. His wife said he was crazy until she tried it…”best investment ever”, she said 🙂 

Some Japanese don’t like their photo taken. Also if touring (Kyoto for example), there are “acceptable times” when to take photos, and some not. In general I shy away from taking people photos unless I ask. If you take a photo of a performer, tip them.

The Subway/Metro system is outstanding. I used it all the time (in combo with Google Maps which was key in helping me around).  it is initially confusing at big train stations since there are many train companies that overlap service. My trick is to find the nearest stop at my destination and that becomes the train line I take. If you have a guide, great. if not, just buy a bunch of one-way tickets. It’s rather simple: Walk to the train board: look at board to see where you want to go, it says how many Yen it costs to get there from the station you’re currently in, and you buy a ticket for that amount. Put ticket in to get through AND get out at end of trip (it ensures you paid properly).

Explore

Even though my trips were for work, I dedicated time to explore. Most nights I would walk to the nearest Metro station. Adventures await there! In the days (weekend or morning before flight) I would walk early. There’s something about seeing a city wake up that shows you its spirit. If I have a spare day, I’ll pick a train route and hit the main spots in Tokyo. It took me 4 or 5 hours but I got to see most of the major sites (and some small back-alley unique Tokyo scenes) because I was willing to wander.

Explore all there is to eat!

Of course, wandering has its moments of anxiety. Once I was with a business colleague who brought us to a delightfully vintage restaurant in Osaka. Later he told me that the nice gentlemen waiting outside were members of the Yakuza (I only knew that name from Hawaii-5-0!)…this was after he said the restaurant used to be a brothel (and that the craft was still practiced on that street). 🙂 We ended up walking 20 minutes down some pretty shady alleys to get to a street big enough where taxi felt safe to drive. Adventure!

Airport Customs

Haneda is a smaller airport so quite nice. Good choice! Customs isn’t scary. Just make sure you have your passport handy and only speak if asked. Don’t offer more info than they ask for. “Reason for visit” – “visiting my cousin”. or “a business meeting”  should be short and sweet. You both can approach customs agent at same time.

On your way back, US will ask if you’ve been “near livestock” and other wilderness stuff. just don’t pet any cows. US Customs doesn’t like that. You can’t really bring any food through, so don’t take airline snacks/fruit through customs. If you want to bring back bottles of saki or whatever, that’s fine, just check it, wrap it in clothes. All good. I’ve brought back many bottles of special brew/spirits over my years of travel and have never had one break.

Summary

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask questions in the comments.  I can’t stress enough to just give yourself time. Enjoy all the moments, and use all your senses. The smells, tastes, feels sights, sounds, and a sixth “muse”, it’s all great.

I can’t wait to get back there!

28 Years, Design, Cloud Journeys, Loss, Gain

I mark my 28th anniversary at IBM on Monday, August 31st.

In a very real sense, each of the 28 years have built to this moment…that what I’m doing now is only possible because of everything I’ve learned. 

Let me explain…

While I started out in development, most of my years were spent in design; designing interaction for several products that were born with my pencil, flourished with our team collaborating with users, developers, product owners, and still thrive to this day. In some cases, however, we’ve had to mourn the product’s death.  (a hard lesson that every thing has a season, and especially in tech, and you will outlive most of your grandest achievements).

The peak of the flourishing was when I led two design projects: one for cloud, and one for systems. We used latest design techniques at the time to capture what users needed, paired with what I called the 6 pillars of crafting a killer user experience. Soon after, the IBM Design studio emerged, and we adopted IBM Design Thinking, which uses a variety of techniques to focus the design on measurable outcomes, bringing together diverse teams and form a continual loop of Observe, Reflect, Make.

Then came what I call, “The year of the Troubles”, where my technical depth collided with the design mission of the day.

I mourned, then moved on, deciding to learn about other areas of the company (offering management, sales enablement) and then got the chance to work with the best of IBM in the Hybrid Cloud CTO Office, and now in the Cloud Engagement Hub.

It’s here, in the Cloud Engagement Hub, where every bit of those 28 years comes into daily use; and while I did not plan this out from day one, it seems clear to me that I couldn’t do this work today without having experienced the following in my IBM journey…

…how to test systems and devices that would be used in production

…how to lead that team to scale excellence

…how to develop in enterprise shops where large teams depend on you

…how to design user interfaces used by admins to keep their production systems healthy

…how to lead teams that deliver those user experiences

…how to work across distant teams with different cultures to achieve excellence

…how to communicate with confidence, compassion, and diplomacy both inwardly to teams and externally to clients because there are people that are hard to work with. Always have been and always will be

…how to mourn the loss of what I love doing because my skills, while award-winning, were not from “formal training”

…how to pick myself up and find a new path

…how to enable others to do their best through technical accuracy and “knowing our user”

…how to tell a story…that is accurate, technical, current, and compelling

…how to experiment to become an expert in new things, knowing each learning is hard

…how to deliver during high-pressure situations where a lot is on the line

…how to blend deep understanding of our tech, deep understanding of our clients, and compassion for those I interact with…to create a cloud journey that benefits everyone

Each one of those I use nearly every day.

In the work I do now, helping clients define and execute on their technical cloud journeys, I have the chance to bring everything together…and do what I love most…

Design.

But not UI design, nor even user experience design of a product, nor even leading a design army to deliver a large cloud offering,…

I get to design a specific client’s end-to-end technical cloud journey. I get to bring together ALL that IBM has to offer: Cloud, Services, Software, Systems, world-wide experts, and treat each as a design ingredient…part of the palette …to deliver not just products that will delight them, but a customized multi-year journey that will delight them at all levels: business, innovation, IT, Cloud, revenue, …and on and on.

So while I had to mourn the loss of my design world, it turns out it was essential to break me out of the box that would have kept me in. I’ve rebuilt, reimagined, date I say redesigned what I do to to help others in deeper ways than I could have ever imagined:

I design technical cloud journeys

And using my years of design experience is a big part of why it works:

  • Using design thinking techniques for all on the team to contribute delivers better ideas, better solutions.
  • Using storyboards and as-is journeys and to-be journeys help communicate the vision
  • Using Hills (a key ‘north star’ technique) help keep the team on track, the client interested, and in the world of cloud journeys, has a measurable outcome we can commit to (financially and experientially).
  • Using my intuition, gut instincts, and creativity to craft a technical cloud journey that is uniquely suited for the client.

This is an exciting time!

I have a lot more thoughts around “Cloud Journey Thinking”, so stay tuned for future articles on how I’m working to apply Design Thinking in a much broader sense to deliver technical cloud journeys to clients.

Autoscaling Kubernetes Clusters in IBM Cloud

(Some of my hintervision thoughts are posted elsewhere. Here is an article from our Cloud Engagement Hub publication on Medium)

Intro

With the constant enhancements in cloud capabilities, there really is no excuse for an application to fail because it ran out of resources. In an earlier blog I detailed how to set up autoscaling policies for an application, and today I will detail how to automatically scale entire clusters.

For this procedure, I will be using a Red Hat OpenShift cluster on IBM Cloud running OCP 4.3, and I’ll be using our trusty “Stock Trader” microservices-built application.

Create Cluster

I first went to IBM Cloud to create a Kubernetes cluster, which I called ‘hintercluster’:

That’s it. The IBM service then provisions the worker nodes, prepares them, and in 10 minutes or so I had my cluster ready.

Add Cluster Autoscaler

Once the cluster was created and ready to go, I needed to install the cluster autoscaler (I used this link as my guide). The plug-in is installed through a helm chart so the following steps get helm configured and then the chart installed.

First, I logged into my IBM Cloud account using the ibmcloud command line. Then, I used the oc command line to connect from my laptop to my OpenShift cluster so that the helm commands ran against ‘hintercluster’.

Second, I had to add Helm 3.2 onto my laptop. Since I last used helm in 2.x time, a lot has changed, including the requirement to run the helm tiller on the cluster. This is a great enhancement since I was able to add the helm CLI and start helming without any cluster setup. I did have to alter the written instructions by using brew upgrade helm rather than brew install helm since I had and older release of helm already installed.

brew upgrade helm

Third, I added the chart repo that contained the cluster autoscaler:

helm repo add iks-charts https://icr.io/helm/iks-charts

helm repo update

When I installed the cluster autoscaler I also needed to define the behavior of it. Notice the — set variable. You will want to use this define your worker node maximum (in this case it is set to 10), and minimum (in this case it is set to 2), and don’t forget to set enabled=true.

helm install ibm-iks-cluster-autoscaler iks-charts/ibm-iks-cluster-autoscaler --namespace kube-system --set workerpools[0].default.max=10,workerpools[0].default.min=2,workerpools[0].default.enabled=true

Finally, I verified the cluster autoscaler is running by running this command:

oc get pods --namespace=kube-system | grep ibm-iks-cluster-autoscaler

That command returned the following:

ibm-iks-cluster-autoscaler-6cdfbb8b8-ghc42       1/1       Running   0

Then I ran this command:

oc get service --namespace=kube-system | grep ibm-iks-cluster-autoscaler

That command returned the following:

ibm-iks-cluster-autoscaler   ClusterIP   172.21.152.19   <none>        8085/TCP

Add Application to Scale

To show how the cluster automatically scales in response to applications requesting more resources, I needed to add an application. None better (for us) than using Stock Trader. You can certainly use your own, but this one already had HPAs (Horizontal Pod Autoscalers) defined and it has multiple microservices to scale up and down.

To get Stock Trader installed, I used the new Stock Trader Operator, using this blog entry as a guide.

It was fairly straight forward. I just ran the commands it suggested, and in the UI added the information to our running services for DB2, MQ, Redis, and ODM.

Using the Cluster Autoscaler

Now that we have our application running on our autoscale equipped cluster, I needed to start triggering the cluster autoscaler. The cluster autoscaler scales clusters based on the “resource requests”, or CPU allocation. That means that it will autoscale based on resources requested, not based on actual CPU utilization. In practice the cluster autoscaler will start scaling when a pod cannot be scheduled by the Kubernetes Scheduler due to resource requests not able to be met.

Therefore, to trigger the cluster to start auto-scaling, I added more running pods in the Stock Trader application, and for good measure, also increased the resource requests. To increase resource requests, I clicked on the deployment, then selected the “YAML” tab, and scrolled to the “resources” section:

Since I wanted to ensure the Cluster Autoscaler would trigger, I increased CPU Requests to 1200m. To be clear: an application can be deployed without any resource requests/limits specified, but I do not recommend it. For many reasons (app autoscaling, cluster autoscaling, quota, etc.) you really need to have resource requests/limits specified (along with liveness and readiness probes but you can read about that in our cloud native blogs)

To increase the pod count, I opened the OpenShift UI, navigated to the “trader-scale-portfolio” deployment, and increased the number of pods. It started with one pod, and I scaled it to 25.

After a few minutes, the deployments stopped, so I looked at the UI and it was paused on 15 deployed pods:

The cluster autoscaler scans the Kubernetes scheduler every 10 seconds, so it will initiate the request fairly quickly to scale-up. Once I noticed the provisioning paused, I then opened the IBM Cloud Clusters UI and saw that the number of worker nodes was being increased:

After a few minutes waiting to provision the VM and prepare it as a worker node, Kubernetes continued to deploy pods. I looked at the deployment UI and soon saw the pod count at 25:

To verify what the cluster autoscaler accomplished, I opened the worker node view and saw the cluster had quickly increased to 5 worker nodes:

I also ran a check on the command line to ensure all pods were running, I ran

kubectl get deployments

and sure enough, all the deployment scaling increases have completed:

I let the application run for a while, then decided to “scale down” back to 1 pod each microservice. The cluster autoscaler scales down based on there being less than 50% of total CPU being requested, but it waits 10 minutes before removing a compute node, so it takes longer to get to the target “scaled down” state than it does to scale up. That said, the scale down of the pods took merely seconds since it’s just deleting pods. Eventually, everything settled down and I ran the command again to view deployments:

Interesting Findings

One of the interesting findings in this was that the Stock Trader operator quickly proved its worth. In this declarative world of Kubernetes, the operator controls most everything about the Stock Trader application, and as I tried to “mess with the app” in order to test the autoscaling, it kept “fixing” things. For example, I tried to edit the HPA, but the operator wouldn’t let me. Additionally, I tried to manually scale up the deployment (increase the pod count) but it would always kill the newly created pod to match the deployment yaml file. In the end I “scaled down the stock trader operator deployment to zero so that I could temporarily regain control.

What this shows me is that operators are powerful, and that in production they provide an added level of controls so that human error of entering the wrong number can be prevented; but it also shows me that the operator should be installed in a namespace that has stricter access controls than the namespace it’s deployed into. That way only trusted experts can alter the operator itself.

Another interesting finding is that while I started with three worker nodes, and the cluster autoscaler increased to five, when it scaled down, the lowest worker node count was four. Initially I thought there was a defect…and there was! But only in my head! Only later I realized that this is due to the cluster autoscaler using different metrics to scale up vs. scale down. Remember: It uses “Resource Requests” to scale up…if the Kubernetes scheduler can’t provision a pod, it triggers a scale-up. This means the worker node could be at 90% capacity of requested CPU and could still schedule a deployment depending on how big the worker node is and how much resource is requested. However, it will only scale-down if a worker node is running with less than 50% of its total resources available for 10 minutes. This is a fairly big difference. The good news is that these values can be customized. All the details (with sample .yaml) can be found here.

A third interesting finding was that when I edited the YAML to increase resource requests, OpenShift nicely updated the pods based on the deployment strategy, in this case “RollingUpdate”, and used the “MaxUnavailable” value in the deployment. If you look closely at the images above you will see I eventually increased the maximum unavailable to 4 so that the 25 pods would update faster. However, in production, faster is not always better, so think wisely on your update strategy (learn more here)

The last interesting finding is that for an MZR-enabled cluster, which spreads work across three availability zones, the cluster autoscaler will work to scale-up all worker pools of the same type. It may not scale each worker pool for the multi-zone cluster to the same exact number of worker nodes, but will use the same rules to ensure there is capacity to deploy. Alternately, you can choose to opt-out of auto-balancing the matching worker pools resulting in each zone being auto-scaled at its own rate and pace.

For additional deep-dive findings, take a look at this detailed FAQ.

Summary

Scaling clusters, as well as applications, is essential for running mission-critical workloads. The cluster autoscaler works great on both IBM Kubernetes Service and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud. If you have questions and comments, I’d love to hear of your experiences in the comments.

Chat next time!

Calculating Business Value of Application Modernization - A Pragmatic Approach

(Some of my hintervision thoughts are posted elsewhere. Here is an article from our Cloud Engagement Hub publication on Medium)

By Greg Hintermeister and Eric Herness

Application modernization business value can be calculated by measuring the specific impact modernization has on a number of behavioral variables.

Introduction

In working with dozens of clients this past year, we at the Cloud Engagement Hub started refining how we can more quickly help clients calculate the holistic, end-to-end business value of modernizing their applications. What we found is that while past conversations focused on cost savings found on a financial spreadsheet (infrastructure savings, licensing savings, etc), our Cloud Engagement Hub conversations with clients included many other aspects, including development, deployment, and operational behaviors that are altered when an application is modernized. A lot of these aspects can be measured with great accuracy since they are done today in more traditional forms, and equally as measurable after an application is modernized.

The following describes our current progress on how we calculate business value of modernization by measuring (or projecting) changes to many standard variables clients measure every day.

Our goal is to show that working with IBM to modernize applications isn’t a technical experiment, isn’t a science project, but is a solid business decision that will provide a visible return on investment, and will improve revenue in tangible, measurable ways.

Further, by focusing on variables that clients are familiar with, we can set up dashboards to provide real-time weekly progress on the value they are achieving…where based on these facts, can push their teams, or IBM, or both, to achieve the business value they deserve.

As you study this, provide any feedback in the comments. We’d love to discuss this in depth with you.

Variables Used

These are the variables in our pragmatic approach to calculating modernization business value. Each can be measured individually. The idea is that they should be measured before App Mod, and then either projected or measured after App Mod. They should be calculated for the level of modernization you choose: Containerize, Repackage, Refactor, Externalize. Based on your target, the variables will hold different values. The goal is to obtain the change of these variables; the delta. The delta will then be used in the formula to calculate business value.

Note: For some clients, not all variables are relevant. That’s OK. If you don’t have a way to measure, or don’t some of variables will change much when doing App Mod, then leave the change as zero.

Time-Based Behavioral Variables

These time-based variables can be divided into two categories: Development Focused, and Operations Focused. I know…a true DevOps environment doesn’t separate the two, but most enterprise shops are on a transformation journey and many still separate dev and operations.

As will be described in the details section, to calculate these variables, think about the tasks you perform, how many times you do each task, and what it would mean to automate these tasks.

Development Focused:

  • Provisioning (P) Time to stand up dev/test environments (clusters, middleware, pipeline, etc.)
  • Deployment (D) Time to deploy new app instances on an existing environment for dev/test
  • Extensibility (E) Time to add new function based on user needs, market changes
  • Testing (T) Time to test deployable units

Operations Focused:

  • Provisioning (P) Time to stand up pre-production or production environments (clusters, middleware, pipeline, etc.)
  • Deployment (D) Time to deploy new app instances on an existing environment for production
  • Scaling Speed (Ss) Time to scale application to necessary levels to respond to demand
  • Resiliency (R) Time to recover from a datacenter/environment outage
  • Maintenance (M) Time to maintain running environments
  • Time to Market (Tm) Time to deliver new revenue-generating feature to market

Cost Variables

  • Infrastructure (I) Cost of Infrastructure (VMs, Bare Metal, Kubernetes Clusters) including what’s needed for ‘ready reserve’ for future scaling needs
  • Labor (La) Cost of labor per unit of measure
  • License (Li) Cost of licensing for app runtime/middleware
  • Feature Revenue (Rf) Revenue of a feature / unit of measure
  • AppMod Cost (Am) Cost to modernize to target level (containerize, repackage, refactor) multiplied by cost per unit of measure

Calculations

To calculate the business value, each element of the equation needs to be measured. Below, the elements represent the changes (delta) of each variable before and after modernization. If you don’t have the “after” measurement, the details section below will offer some suggested defaults based on real client feedback.

Time Saved in Modernization (Vt)
Vt
is the aggregated time saved across all time-based variables above. The variables represent the App Lifecycle stages by containerizing, repackaging, or refactoring the application.

Vt = ΔP + ΔD + ΔE + ΔSs + ΔR + ΔM + ΔT

Costs Saved in Modernization (Vc)
Vc
is the costs saved based on the time saved that was calculated above. This variable is simple the time saved (Vt) multiplied by labor costs per unit measured.

Vc = Vt · La

Feature Value (Vf)
Vf
is the value of delivering a revenue-generating feature earlier due to the time saved modernizing the application. (Feature value) equals the time saved delivering a revenue-generating feature multiplied by revenue per unit measured. This should be run for every feature to reinforce that if a feature can be delivered 6 months early due to modernization, then future delivered features will see that benefit as well. It’s up to each client to determine how many Vf’s should be included into the final business value calculation. Generally, all planned features over the next two years should be used for accurate business value understanding.

Vf1 = ΔTm1 · Rf // Feature one, time saved with modernization, multiplied by estimated revenue of that feature
Vf2 = ΔTm2 · Rf // Feature two, time saved with modernization, multiplied by estimated revenue of that feature
Vf3 = ΔTm3 · Rf
// Feature three, time saved with modernization, multiplied by estimated revenue of that feature

See the details section below for examples.

Calculate Modernization Business Value
Calculate the business value by adding all of the above together, then subtract the cost of modernizing the application itself.

Bv (Business Value) equals the costs saved with modernization (Vc), the infrastructure costs saved (ΔI), the licensing costs saved (Δli), The Feature Value for each planned feature (Vf), and then subtracting the investment to perform the target application modernization techniques (Am)

Bv = Vc + Vf1 + Vf2 + Vf3 + ΔI + ΔLi — Am

One final thought before we move onto the details: Since modernization moves the teams to an agile culture, many of these calculations should have a multiplier to reflect frequency. While teams may provision new environments today only once every 4 months, that may be because its too complicated. If it can be done in 2 hours, then there will be more than 3 provisions per year! There could be 100’s…magnifying the productivity of teams in the new, fully automated, agile culture.

Details: How to Calculate Each Variable

The following sections provide scenarios and suggestions on how we are working to obtain the changes of time due to modernizing the application.

Provisioning (P)

Definition: Time to stand up environments (clusters, middleware, pipeline, etc.)

Scenario: A development team needs an environment to enhance an application with a new feature. They need to stand up an application runtime, Db2, and MQ. This variable will measure how much time it takes from the initial request to when the developer can start working with that environment.

How to get measurements:

Simply asking experienced developers will give you a good estimate

  • What is being provisioned, and how long does it take before you can use it? (DB, runtime (WebSphere), middleware instances (MQ, IIB, …)
  • What is it’s purpose (Sandbox, dev, test, prod)
  • Who needs to approve, authorize, manage the environments?
  • What automation is used to provision?

It is quite common that a VM will take 2 weeks to become available for developers. While the actual provisioning can be done much more quickly, the approvals, validation, and exceptions result in most provisioning times to be measured in weeks, not hours.

Examples:

For initial estimates, the value of P would equal 6 weeks. If you don’t have an estimate for “After Containers”, then we can use these estimates or values from other client’s experiences we have worked with.

You will notice that you actually have two choices for estimating the delta: 1) effort to accomplish, or 2) linear time to accomplish. In the example above using the low-end estimates (and 8 hours per day), the time saved for provisioning would be as follows:

Before:

  • Effort to accomplish: 7 weeks (35 days, or 280 hours)
  • Linear time to accomplish: 3 weeks (15 days, or 120 hours)

After

  • Time to accomplish: 2:41 hours (assuming some manual authentication)

ΔP = 117.3hours of linear time saved per provisioning instance (even more “effort” saved!)

Deployment (D)

Definition: Time to deploy new app instances on an existing environment

Scenario: An application needs to be deployed onto an existing environment. A test team and support education team need to run a new instance of the application. The assumption is that development is complete, and the application components are ready for deployment.

How to get measurements:

Measurements for this can be gathered from asking devs/testers/operations teams

  • When you get a request to add an application to an existing environment, how long does it take?
  • What tools do you use to deploy applications?
  • What configuration is required to connect the application to the dependent resources?
  • What load balancing and network changes need to happen to get the application running?

In our experience, adding applications to VM-based platforms can take quite some time, whereas a containerized application, using kubectl apply deploy.yaml could take 1–2 minutes.

Examples:

Extensibility (E)

Definition: Time to add new function based on user needs, market changes

Scenario: Product leader defines a new capability to add to an existing application based on user feedback. This variable measures the time it takes to add that capability to a production application.

How to get measurements:

This is intended to measure the productivity of the development team when reacting to a customer request or problem. To get the measurement, it’s important to understand the developer workflow. Some teams may be in a modified waterfall with dependencies and approval boards, while other teams are sprint-based and deliver as soon as the content is ready.

Examples:

Scaling Speed (Ss)

Definition: Time to scale application to necessary levels to respond to demand

Scenario: As demand increases for an application, it needs to scale up (or down) to meet those demands. Additional compute, storage, networking needs to be added for additional instances. This variable will measure the time it takes to activate that scaling. For WebSphere JavaEE applications, scaling includes acquiring more VMs, add a node to a WAS cell, federate that node, then add a cluster member that lives on that node.

In the end, the expected value will be around what it takes to provision an environment and deploy an application (P + D).

How to get measurements:

This is measured because auto-scaling is not a reality for many applications. “Predictive scaling” is what many application and operations teams perform, predicting the demand, and setting up enough spare capacity to handle that additional demand, well before that demand appears.

To get the measurement, look to past events to see how long it took to set up the compute, storage, network, and application communication so that 3x-50x additional demand could be handled.

Examples:

Resiliency (R)

Definition: Time to recover from a data center/environment outage

Scenario: When an environment (or entire data center) has an outage, applications are obviously impacted, but the impact to end users is what’s most concerning. Current operations teams, regardless of technology used, have a resiliency plan to recover from an outage. Some operations teams go to great lengths to ensure applications running on older technology are resilient. Depending on your situation, you may want to measure a number of activities to come to your Resiliency number.

How to get measurements:

Here are questions you can ask your operations teams:

  • (Server outage) How much time does it take to recover from a server outage to get the application back to its “normal” state?
  • (Data Center outage) How much time does it take to recover from a complete data center outage to get the application back to its “normal” state?

There are a number of secondary questions that can add precision to this value. These questions revolve around how much time it takes to prepare an application for an outage so that the time to recover is near zero:

How much time does it take to prepare your application architecture to minimize downtime in the event of an outage?

  • Are you replicating data to a secondary data center?
  • Are you keeping the application up to date on a secondary data center?
  • Are you keeping the that environment hot?
  • Do you have load balancing that routes to multiple data centers/environments?
  • How much detection/reaction of an outage is automated?
  • How much infrastructure is in “ready but idle” state just in case of an outage?

The reality is that after containerizing some applications will still run as “pets” and need application-level synching while others, if architected for cloud, can run as “cattle” and be much more resilient. Either way, running in Kubernetes will automate many of the preparation activities, or at least make them far simpler. (Example: creating a Kubernetes cluster that spans data centers will make worker nodes run in multiple availability zones; greatly increasing application resiliency)

Examples:

Maintenance (M)

Definition: Time to maintain running environments

Scenario: An application has been running in production, and a variety of issues have been collected ranging from operating system patches, application defects, and middleware patches. The application team needs to maintain the running environment to comply with customer demands, regulations, and security policies.

How to get measurements:

This measurement is all about keeping the environment running properly in leu of patches, found defects, etc. As we all know, with existing VM-based applications (or bare metal), there are VM images to prepare, operating system patches to process, dependent middleware patches to process, application defects to fix and push out into production, changes in security policies to honor, and much more, depending on the application and depending on the company. Here is a list of examples to consider.

Note: The time here does not include development time to code a patch, only the time to push the patch into production.

Examples:

Testing (T)

Definition: Time to test deployable units

In traditional development shops, testing is general a separate activity. The move to cloud-native and a DevOps culture is primarily driven by test-driven development which make testing an embedded and natural element of the DevOps process. However, to get there takes effort and investment. This variable is to measure how long it takes to test an application unit before that unit is deployed into production.

Scenario: A test team receives a deployable unit to test for the next round of application enhancements. They previously provisioned the environment and have provisioned the application. Once testing has completed, the application moves to staging for additional integration testing, and finally to production.

How to get measurements:

This measurement is all about capturing the time it takes to fully test the deployable unit. In traditional cases, the deployable unit is the entire application, but once an app is modernized, the deployable unit is an individual container.

This is also capturing the time it takes to prepare for tests that require real-time feedback. While current platforms like Kubernetes log, monitor, and provide health checks for the container, many traditional environments required user interaction, break points, or exit points to achieve the desired scenario.

As a result, this “Testing” measurement is not only measuring time to test, but time to prepare and maintain the tests and the testing environments.

Examples:

Time to Market (Tm)

Definition: Time to deliver new revenue-generating feature to market

This variable is focused on “If you estimate you can generate $1M of revenue over a year, and by modernizing you can push out the feature 6 months earlier, you can achieve $0.5M in business value in modernizing that application for each revenue-generating feature”.

Scenario: A product team determines a new “visual recognition” system will generate $1M per year in additional revenue for their approval system. The dev team has created sprint plans across 5 dev teams to code necessary changes to the UI, backend, data systems, and new “visual generator” AI algorithms.

How to get measurements:

This measurement can be found by asking an application leader to sketch out this scenario and estimate how long it would take to deliver. Initially they would know “it will take one year”, and those skilled with Kubernetes, DevOps, and cloud-native architecture, could estimate as well “it will take us 6 months”

We also have existing client examples where they saw 30% speed increase.

Examples:

Infrastructure (I)

Definition: Cost of Infrastructure (VMs, Bare Metal, Kubernetes Clusters) including what’s needed for ‘ready reserve’ for future scaling needs

This is a basic measurement of infrastructure costs needed to support the application. No real scenario here is needed, just adding up all the infrastructure needed across Dev, Test, Staging, and Production.

How to get measurements:

Infrastructure costs vary greatly depending on the type of application. For this measurement, keep things simple and ask your IT teams:

  • How many VMs does it take to run the application across Dev, Test, Staging, and Production?

One recent client we were at counted 23 VMs to run a fairly basic WAS/JavaEE application with the need of multiple environments, and resiliency, and scaling planning.

The “After containers” is a bit trickier. Obviously, it takes VMs to run Kubernetes clusters, so in some cases we bundle the applications to say “while it took 55 VMs to run these eight applications across environments, it only takes 20 VMs to run the same containerized applications across two Kubernetes clusters”. In this case, two clusters because many clients are fine combining Dev/Test/Staging into one cluster, but still want to keep production separate.

Finally, once your count is obtained, find the cost per VM and find the cost of infrastructure.

Examples:

Labor (La)

Definition: Cost of labor per unit of measure

This is a basic measurement of labor costs per day/month/year, based on the unit of measure the time-based calculations were in.

The goal here is to transform the time savings from the first set of variables to a numeric count.

How to get measurements:

List the different roles involved in the time-based calculations and their cost. This will vary based on role and if the labor is contractors or employees.

Also, there is no real “before/after” in this. Developer skills are precious so while some may see as “reducing labor costs” as a downsizing topic, it should be viewed as a way to make your skilled developers more productive.

License (Li)

Definition: Cost of licensing for app runtime/middleware

Modernizing an application can result in reduce licensing costs from a variety of sources, but accuracy in the calculations is essential. For example, some VM hypervisors have a higher licensing cost than others, but the lower licensed hypervisors may have higher support subscriptions.

How to get measurements:

Add up the number of licenses in use on VMs, and then the number of licenses of VMs running in containers.

Feature Revenue (Rf)

Definition: Revenue of a feature / unit of measure

This is an estimate of how much revenue a feature would add over a period of time. This is related to the Time to Market where you can determine “if a feature will bring in an estimated $1M over a year, and I reduce my time to market from 1 year to 6 months, I will have gained $500K in revenue”

Vf (Feature value) = ΔTm · Rf

How to get measurements:

This really comes from the product management team and the market team. This should be known before you are developing a major feature anyway, so should not be a lot of time to calculate.

Here’s what’s important: Even if your team only delivers a subset of the new feature in 6 months, that’s still revenue-generating content out in production faster. Think of it like paying for a loan every week vs. once every 6 months. The sooner you deliver, the more valuable your modernization becomes.

AppMod Cost (Am)

Definition: Cost to modernize to target level (containerize, repackage, refactor) multiplied by cost per unit of measure

This is estimating how much it will take to modernize the target application.

How to get measurements:

The estimating will vary based on the composition and complexity of the application. For JavaEE workloads, using tools like Transformation Advisor will provide a “xyz Developer Days” estimate based on binary scanning of the .ear and .war files. In addition, further analysis of Transformation Advisor’s findings will optimize the estimate to account for duplicate counting, etc.

The final variable should be the number of developer days for an application to be containerized, multiplied by the Labor costs.

Future Variables

There are three other variables to consider, but so far we are not including them because our goal is to focus on variables that can clearly be measured. Scaling Granularity was added as an initial variable, but it overlaps with other variables. One consideration would be to add a “Dependency (Dp)” variable to measure how much time a dev team’s enhancement/patch waits to be deployed so that a dependent team can update their code. Stability (St) is a measurement that we will add later since it will measure how people manually add Istio-like capabilities using traditional networking vs Kubernetes-specific capabilities like Istio.

Scaling Granularity (Sg) Time to scale smaller components after repackaging apps to smaller, feature-focused containers

Dependency (Dp) Time waiting for another team to commit their changes before your already-coded changes can be tested/deployed into production.

Stability (St) Time to write automation to manually create circuit breakers, retry logic, advanced observability (BYO Kubernetes)

Summary

As you can see, while this is still a work in progress, we are quite excited to have the beginning of a framework to measure the business value of Modernization using the behaviors a Dev and Ops team currently uses, with the ability to measure time and cost savings as the application is modernized. To be honest, it’s also exciting to see that when this work progresses, the clients’ culture changes as well to a true DevOps organization…and that’s when savings really accelerate.

We’d love to hear your feedback…see you in the comments!

Auto-Scaling Your Containerized Applications - Part 2

(Some of my hintervision thoughts are posted elsewhere. Here is an article from our Cloud Engagement Hub publication on Medium)

Last time we walked through the ingredients to add auto-scaling to your containerized applications, and provided a best practice to size your pods, and set resource request and limits. This time we will step through what changes were made to Stock Trader in order to have it automatically scale based on CPU utilization along with liveness and readiness probes.

As a refresher, Stock Trader is our microservices-based application that is freely available on github:

Step 1: Add Readiness and Liveness Probes (see in github)

The readiness and liveness probes we added started with a very basic URL that said “this liberty runtime is up”.

see in github

Over time, we added custom probes that were unique for each microservice. As mentioned above, the “Portfolio” microservice was “ready” only when it could connect to its data source. The “Stock-Quote” microservice, however, was only ready when it could connect to the stock quote API provided by API-Connect.

NOTE: as you develop your liveness probe, make sure you have resource limits and a low auto-scale maximum set. In our initial testing, the liveness probe would always fail, which resulted in an immediate restart. However, the HPA declared “I need at least 2 running at average 50% CPU utilization”, and since the startup of a pod took more than 50% CPU, in a very short period of time after we deployed portfolio, we ramped up from 2 pods to 10. It could have easily scaled to 100’s if we had set the maximum that high. Therefore, during these initial stages, we suggest you declare your resource limits, and auto-scale to a small maximum (10, for example).

Step 2: Add Resource Requests/Limits

As suggested in the best-practice, if you have a Liberty-based microservice, use the following resources as a starting point:

However, as soon as you can, run your microservice with a decent load (simulated if needed) so that you can start graphing your microservice. We used the “ICP Namespace Performance IBM Provided 2.5” Grafana dashboard. This gave us the cleanest example of how our pods ran. If you are using Microclimate, you could also open its “App Monitoring” view and add load onto your Java application.

In this image, we are showing the Stock Trader microservices and we were able to monitor CPU and memory usage in our initial tests:

Once you verify the range of your microservice CPU and memory usage, refine the resource requests and limits.

A couple last notes on resource request/limits:

  • These resource values are not only critical for auto-scale, they’re also used in basic Kubernetes scheduling. This means that if you specify values that are too high, Kubernetes may not find a worker node with enough resource. We found many times cases where ICP catalog content was sized too high and we could run in development just fine with much less CPU and memory.
  • Early in development, you may not specify resource requests/limits. For us, this was so that we could have one pod to debug and view logs through. Kubernetes dynamically altered resources for that single pod as long as there was resource available in the compute node. However, we found quickly that as soon as we added resource limits, the pod, during initial testing, could hit resource limits quickly. In summary, as soon as you add resource limits, you will want to create your auto-scale policy to handle additional resource needs.

Step 3: Create Auto-scale policies

When first starting out, we recommend creating your first autoscale policy through the CLI. The following example is creating an HPA called “portfolio” to attach to the deployment called portfolio, and manage the number of pods between 2 and 10, based on average CPU % utilization across all “ready” pods so that the average stays around 50%.

kubectl autoscale deployment portfolio -n stock-trader — cpu-percent=50 — min=2 — max=10

To monitor the hpa, run the following to get the table below:

kubectl get hpa -n stock-trader

Notice in the above output that the “portfolio” HPA requires at least 2 pods to be running and will alter so that the real average CPU % is roughly equal to the target average CPU %. In this case notice that since we do not have any load on the pods, CPU % is only 8%. But since the minimum number of pods is 2, it cannot scale down any further. Once further testing is done, then we added the HPA into the yaml file. Now, every time the “portfolio” microservice is deployed, the associated HPA will also be created.

Step 4: Edit Auto-scale policies

Initially, when we created the HPAs through kubectl, editing was quite messy. As a result, even the docs suggested to delete and recreate the policies. This was simple kubectl delete hpa portfolio. However, we found that after we created the autoscales policies through the deploy.yaml file, editing the HPA through kubectl was easy:

(view github example)

Step 5: Add Load and Measure Usage/Scaling

For our Stock Trader microservices we ran a tool we created called “Looper” ( view here). This ran our pods (except the UI) with repeated load. Then, to exercise the UI, we ran a test container:

kubectl run -i — tty load-generator — image=busybox /bin/sh

Then ran:

while true; do wget -q -O- https://9.42.19.205/trader; done

With this load across all microservices, we can now look at the results via the CLI. Viewing realtime HPA details here shows that utilization is too high so the HPA is actively provisioning additional pods:

Later on, we see they are more balanced:

Finally, after we stop the load across all pods, the cool-down period of 5–7 minutes results in scaling back to the minimum:

Notice in this Grafana dashboard it shows not only the Stock Trader pods but the looper and load generator pods.

Step 6: Validate Stability

Once your microservices-based app is autoscaling properly, now is the time to run ‘creative tests’, chaos monkey-style tests, to see how it responds to outages and additional load. Here are some examples to try based on Stock Trader architecture:

  • Add multiple load sources to simulate “Peak usage”
    In our case, we needed “Looper” and our UI load generator to generate normal steady-state usage. For additional “peak usage” load, set up a second “looper” running from a different source so that you can hit your application with bursts of activity in addition to the regular load.
  • Kill pods
    Go into the UI or kubectl CLI and just start deleting pods. This will test a real-world scenario where a pod dies and needs to be rescheduled. You could also go into the deployment object and scale up/down manually to see how the HPA reacts.
  • Taint worker nodes
    To simulate pulling the plug on a VM, add a taint to a worker node that prohibits scheduling and execution. This will remove all pods from the VM and schedule them on other worker nodes. In some cases, you won’t have enough resource to auto-scale properly so you can see how your app works in distress.
  • Remove middleware (Redis)
    To simulate a problem with middleware you depend on (Redis, for example), you can scale down to zero the redis deployment. This will then let you validate your code can handle the outage.
  • Define new data source (test liveness)
    Test the liveness check in your pods. If you recall, our “Portfolio” pod said that if it gets three concurrent errors in calling the data source it is no longer “live”. To test this, create a second data source, edit the secret for “portfolio”, and scale down the existing data source (no need to delete … you will be testing this again). You will see the existing portfolio pods get removed after 3 failed attempts at the now-dead data source and when the new pods start, it will pick up the secret with the new (and running) data source and soon enough your app will be alive and kicking.

Step 7: Consider Istio Optimization

For those using Istio for your microservices mesh, the main consideration is the resource requests and limits. During your initial testing with Istio, increase the resource limits for your microservices by 100m CPU and 128Mi Memory so that when the Istio sidecar container is added, your pod will still auto-scale appropriately.

Auto-Scaling using Custom Metrics

If you have custom application-level metrics you want to use in your auto-scaling you can do that by following this documentation. In summary, you will need to install a Prometheus adapter into IBM Cloud Private and then follow the instructions to configure your .yaml files.

OK! Thanks for reading and keep learning! Have questions? I encourage you to post comments below and engage in our conversation.

Auto-Scaling Your Containerized Applications - Part 1

(Some of my hintervision thoughts are posted elsewhere. Here is an article from our Cloud Engagement Hub publication on Medium)

The promise of Kubernetes with the ability to automatically schedule and scale your application deployments is enticing. But it’s not Magic! Making your microservices-based application automatically scale requires planning by both developers and cloud admins.

The concepts of auto-scaling are not unique to microservices, but what you need to know and understand is different. Developers need to contribute, as well as DevOps engineers, and certainly cloud admins to make auto-scaling successful. Some of that contribution comes by providing liveness and readiness probes in the app configuration, and the rest comes from knowing about the behaviors of each microservice and interactions between microservices.

This blog post will briefly introduce the concept of auto-scaling in Kubernetes. I’ll then follow with part 2, which will provide more concrete insights and supporting examples for specific languages and frameworks.

The following concepts need to be considered when you want to have your application scale in a Kubernetes environment:

Readiness and Liveness probes

Liveness and Readiness probes are essential because they let your microservice communicate to Kubernetes. The Readiness probe tells Kubernetes that the pod is up and ready to receive traffic. The liveness probe tells Kubernetes that the pod is still alive and working as expected.

The trick for the developer is to communicate meaningful status. In our example, if our “portfolio” microservice cannot connect to its data source, then the pod is not ready to receive traffic. The microservice may be up and kicking and in its own world quite healthy. However, since the portfolio microservice depends on the data source to set/get information, it will not want to receive traffic until it has an active data source connection. Once it is “ready”, it then checks for consecutive errors. If portfolio detects three consecutive errors for any communication, then the developer assumes there’s a problem and the pod should be killed and a new one started. Of course, each microservice may require a unique definition of “am I ready” and “am I living”.

Finally, while readiness and liveness probes are not required for auto-scale policies, they are essential so that the pods that are running are productive. Otherwise, the auto-scaler may detect 5 pods running under 50% utilization, but none of them are doing actual work. Timing is important, too. If the “readiness” probe says the pod is “ready” too soon, then work will be routed before the app instance is ready and the transaction will fail. If the “readiness” probe takes too long to say the pod is “ready”, then the existing pods will become overworked and could start failing due to capacity limits.

Readiness and liveness probes are mentioned again because your autoscaling needs to take into account how long it takes for additional pods to become available, and that a liveness probe that is too sensitive can cause your autoscaling to thrash needlessly due to pods being destroyed when they are not truly dead.

Resource requests and limits

Each microservice should specify how much resource (memory and CPU) is required to run. While not required to run in Kubernetes, these resource requests and limits are required for autoscalers to kick in. In Kubernetes, you will want to specify resource requests (how much CPU and Memory to allocate initially when bringing up the pod), and resource limits (the maximum CPU and Memory to allocate over time).

Here’s a sample that a deploy.yaml file would have to specify resource requests and limits:

Horizontal Pod Autoscaler

The Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) is created by attaching itself to a deployment or other Kube object that controls pod scheduling. In its most basic form, the HPA will look at all pods in a deployment, average the current CPU utilization across all the pods, and if the percent utilized is more than what the HPA is set to, then the HPA will provision additional instances. Conversely, if the percent utilized is less than what the HPA is set to, then the HPA will remove instances until the utilization is approaching what was desired.

Here I’m creating an HPA that attaches itself to the deployment called “portfolio”, and will scale the number of pods between 2 and 10, depending on if the average CPU utilization is above or below 50%.

Vertical Pod Autoscaler

An emerging capability in Kubernetes is vertical pod autoscaling (VPA), which means it can scale the resource requests / limits in real-time so an individual pod can take up more resource.

VPAs can be quite useful for applications that are not written to horizontally auto-scale. If it needs more resource then it can vertically scale. While the best practice is to architect your application for auto-scale, there are some cases where it is not possible and VPA is a good option.

Further, VPAs can be powerful companions to HPAs. For example: If I have an HPA provisioning new pods, it may come up against capacity limits for available worker nodes. In that case, a new pod will not be provisioned. This can happen when the Kubernetes scheduler fails due to affinity rules, resource availability for full pods, readiness probe indicating delay, etc). If you set a VPA to scale the pods vertically in that situation (give each pod 10–20% more CPU and/or Memory), then the existing pods could have some “breathing room” and grow with the small amount of resource still available in the worker node they’re running in.

Node Affinity, Taints and Tolerations

Node affinity, taints and tolerations allow users to constrain which worker nodes an application can be deployed to.

An affinity rule tells Kubernetes what kind of worker node the pod requires or prefers (you can think of it as “hard” or “soft” compliance). The affinity matching is based on node labels. This means that you can prefer that your pod runs on any of the 5 of the 50 worker nodes in the cluster that are labeled as “GPU-enabled”, and also require that the nodes run on any of the 20 of the 50 worker nodes labeled as “Dept42”.

To view the labels on a node, run kubectl get nodes -o wide — show-labels

Taints and Tolerations tell Kubernetes what kind of pods a worker node will accept. This means that a set of worker nodes can be tainted with “old-hardware” and only pods that have a toleration for “old-hardware” will be scheduled.

Think of it this way:

affinity is pod-focused: “I am a pod…there are so many nodes to choose from let me filter so I get one I will run well on”. Affinity lets the pod choose what nodes it will deploy into based on how the nodes are labeled. “I prefer new hardware nodes” “I require GPU-equipped nodes” and then Kubernetes will schedule appropriately.

Taints/Tolerations is node-focused: “I am a worker node…there are so many pods out there, but only certain ones will run well on me due to my unique traits…I will add a taint to require pods to declare that it will tolerate this unique trait”. Taints let the node declare “I am old hardware” or “I am only for production” and as a result, the Kubernetes scheduler will only deploy pods onto those nodes if the pod has a toleration matching that taint: “I am production pod” or, “I will run on old hardware”.

This is one reason why clear communication between development and cloud ops is essential.

Resource Quota

Each namespace in Kubernetes can have a resource quota. This is set up by the cloud admin to limit how much resource can be consumed within a namespace. As this is a hard limit (actual number, not percentage), once an application scales up to the quota limit, it will get a failure if trying to auto-scale beyond the quota.

Further, if a quota is set on a namespace, all pods must have resource requests/limits specified or the scheduling of that pod will fail.

This is yet another reason why clear communication between development and cloud ops is essential.

Other Isolation Policies

IBM Cloud Private has support for many levels of multi-tenancy. This includes the ability to control workload deployments to specific resources like worker nodes, VLANs, network firewalls, and more based on teams and namespaces.

Have I mentioned that your development team needs to have clear communication with your cloud ops team? I think so.

Learn more here.

Here is a summary of what you should consider when auto-scaling your application. The actual numbers may vary based on your application, so use this as guide.

  • As you initially create your microservice, give your resource requests/limits a sensible default. This could vary greatly depending on your base image, runtime, etc. For example, for Liberty runtimes, set it between 200m and 1000m for CPU, and 128Mi and 512Mi to Memory. If you set the limits too low, the autoscaler may trigger an additional instance during initial startup because it’s taking too much CPU.
  • Run initial unit tests and use Grafana monitoring to see actual CPU and Memory usage during your tests.
  • Refine your resource requests/limits as needed so your resource limits are 20% more than monitored maximum usage.
  • Set your initial auto-scale policy to scale your application at 50% of CPU usage.
  • If you use Istio, increase all resource limits by 100m CPU and 128Mi Memory to handle the additional side-car.
  • Work with your cloud ops team if any affinity rules or resource quotas will be in place in the clusters across your stages of delivery: development, test, stage, production.

Note: For classic WebSphere applications that you migrated into containers using Transformation Advisor, you may not be able to auto-scale. That said you should still create good liveness and readiness probes and set your resource request/limits.

Next time we will step through how that best practice is set up using Liberty-based microservices.

OK! Thanks for reading and keep on the lookout for Part 2 coming soon!

The Stark Reality of App Modernization

(Some of my hintervision thoughts are posted elsewhere. Here is an article from our Cloud Engagement Hub publication on Medium)

Part of my work in the Cloud Engagement Hub is to help clients modernize their applications. I’ve spent years focused on public and private cloud environments, and I show, through technical expertise, how clients can modernize their applications through containerizing workloads and running them across public and private clouds. I get quite deep into the technology, use cases, and value of modernizing applications onto a modern cloud-native platform like Kubernetes.

But I have to come clean: To the 100s of clients I’ve presented to, demoed to, had deep-dive analysis with, I have one thing to say:

I apologize.

I apologize, on behalf of our entire industry, for making app modernization appear simplistic…

…for implying that your “Enterprise App” could be treated like an iPhone app…like a cute little rounded square that you could lift, transform, and with a single tap run in a shiny, fancy new cloud environment with all the benefits of cloud, DevOps, security, and infinite scalability.

I know, most of the time we are forced to simplify our conversations to fit within 40 minute technical sessions at conferences, or short client visits, but we both know there’s so much more we should be discussing.

I apologize on behalf of our industry. We are so competitive that we smooth the modernization reality down to a shiny, polished, wooden goblet that only the finest bourbon-barrel stout pours out of, instead of what it is: a heavy, splintered, thorn-laden pile of reclaimed wood that, once you grab as much as you think you can move, scream at uncovering a hornets nest of issues…hidden for years, just waiting to attack any who dare clear away 20 years of undergrowth.

Finally, I apologize for calling these enterprise applications “apps”, instead of what they are: Time-tested enterprise solutions that fueled your company into the enterprise it is today but now suffer from that same span of time where countless enhancements, add-ons, alterations, and “next-gen transformation” projects through the years have resulted in a solution that should be in the “Smithsonian museum of historical app technology”.

The stark reality is that these enterprise applications can no longer sustain the demands of this modern, cloud-centric environment we all live in, and more importantly, meet our customers’ demands. As my new friend Stephanie said, “your enterprise applications have been architected with time; let us modernize them so you can architect them with intent”.

Modernization has to happen, it’s just a matter of how. And while it’s tempting to keep it simple to show our awesomeness, I, and my colleagues, are here to show the full reality of modernization, how we can help you, and yes…to show our awesomeness through actions, not talk.

From here on out, I make the following vow:

I will, through technical evidence, show a realistic modernization journey that your enterprise applications could take. We will have hard conversations about what it means to modernize, migrate, retain, retire, and replace your applications, along with all the middleware, data, security, and storage that goes along with it. We will talk about your cloud landing zones: the pros and cons of each technology; the fact that you will need to spend MORE money to modernize before you see benefits, but that through continuous modernization of your applications, you will see great value on the other side. We will celebrate your modernization success, and then discuss “what happens next”; how your DevOps processes, your culture, your multicloud capabilities, have all changed and will continue to evolve…and that this is just the beginning of your amazing acceleration to awesomeness.

To do that we will look at our Modernization journey map (Figure 1), and we will take your knowledge, add our assessment, plan our attack, and depending on the complexity of your enterprise application, take multiple parallel modernization journeys. Once ready, we will deploy them into the landing zone of your choice so that your business can accelerate.

Figure 1: Cloud Engagement Hub Modernization Journey Map

For example, I know that even the most basic enterprise app (I know, I’m already calling your thorn-laden hornets’ nest of a solution a cute app) will consist of multiple components: a JavaEE runtime and a database, running on either dated VMs or physical servers. I also know that most of your applications are more complex with multiple components ranging from multiple JavaEE runtimes (WebSphere, WebLogic, JBoss, Tomcat), databases, middleware, “helper add-ons” coded in C, C++, and many have core components coded in COBOL running in a mainframe.

Further, I know that due to the increasing speed of development demands outpacing the speed of VM delivery from IT resulted in your VMs becoming “dirty”; filled with extra tools and helper-apps that sometimes are not even related to a single solution. I know that because I did it too. I needed space to run a tool, and since it would take too long to request a new VM, I just picked one that had low utilization. Repeat this over 10 years and you get this gut-punching “very-bad-day” when you realize that even if you modernize the JavaEE app into a containerized workload and run it in Kubernetes, you still can’t decommission the VM because of all the riff-raff still running in that VM.

When we get to work, we will show how modernizing the “basic” enterprise app into a cloud landing zone will require multiple journeys: containerizing the JavaEE component, migrating the database VM, and at least initially, migrating the VM the Java workload was on to keep the helper apps running.

We will talk about deployment patterns the whole app requires, and the characteristics the app components demand (proximity to each other for performance, latency requirements, data requirements, etc ). This will create consistency in how the apps are deployed onto the target cloud, how they are connected, what security policies and isolation policies are used, what quality and type of storage is used, and on and on.

We will talk about how development practices and operations practices all need to modernize along with your apps. It will be hard, filled with fear (and sometimes failure), but changing culture is probably harder than changing technologies (I know, I’ve done it many times). We will start with small successes…MVPs that you find value in…that help in not only starting your app on its modernization journey, but also your developers, operations teams, and how they will merge into a true DevOps culture.

Further, we will discuss that even the term “deploying into the cloud” is simplistic. We know you want to keep your options open, that cost, location (public, private, multiple vendors) cloud region, capabilities, provided services, network and security capabilities, all matter. We will discuss that some of your apps may thrive on one cloud and others may thrive on another. As a result, multi cloud management is a reality. I know that, and you know it, so we might as well talk it through and make it work like you want.

At the end of the day, my goal is to help your business succeed…to thrive so your clients are delighted (I know…not a technical statement, but true none-the-less). If I can help a fellow human succeed, I feel better, and your trust in me grows. I hope you come to realize, at least for me, I’m not here to sell you our products, I’m here to sell you…

Technical Accuracy

…and a relationship you can depend on throughout your modernization journey.

Sound good? Apology accepted?

Great! Now, let’s get to work!

Be a Mentor, Get a Mentor

This week I got to chat with my mentor, I got to meet a new mentee (what we call colleagues  we are mentoring), and got to have a productive career conversation with my boss. It coincidentally was the week I celebrated my 26th year with the company. As a result I was quickly reminded how valuable these conversations are…at all stages of a career journey, so I thought I’d share what came to mind…

Get a Mentor
It’s really easy in a corporate career to get lost in the swirl. I did…and to be honest I think I’m just coming out of it. I’ve always strived to hustle and perform my best, but without guidance and direction, I can feel like whatever I’m doing isn’t getting me anywhere (tires spinning in mud is what I’ve been saying to describe what I felt). What I’m reminded is that I’m not in this alone. My brief conversations with my mentor show me that others have experienced this before, and found a path for them, and they could help me find my path.

Be a Mentor
My experiences in my 26 years are valuable lessons for others. I had my first mentor session with a potential mentee, and instantly I became grateful for both the good experiences I’ve had and the bad…they’ve helped me become who I am at work, and at this moment provide insight to help others on their journey.

I think this is what I most valuable at this point in my career…to help others succeed…and part of that is to be a mentor to others.

Invest in Meaningful Conversation with your fellow Humans
I’ve also had meaningful conversations at work this week that are not about technology…they were about personal lives, college journeys for our kids, and more. What I’m reminded is that the more I share and engage with other humans the more that conversation helps both myself and the other person.

I become grateful for the things working well in my life, I receive cautionary tales of things that could go sideways in my life in a blink if I don’t continue to put effort into it, and I receive guidance for things I’m struggling with that the other person is succeeding in.

What it all Comes Down To
I’ve got about 16 years left. I told my mentor that regardless of specific path I take, my overall goal is to “Make these last 16 years the best of them all”. After these sets of conversations, I think part of making these coming years the best is to:

  • Help others succeed – no matter what I do, how many I lead (or if I don’t officially lead anyone), or what projects I’m on, if I can help others succeed, it will add more meaning to my career than anything I succeed at personally.
  • Keep Hustling – Keep the throttle down, keep learning, producing, delivering…all the while being nice and supportive of all that surround me
  • Keep Perspective – Nothing I do in my career will last. Tech companies move so fast that even the most successful product will be replaced, enhanced, modified to the point where my individual contributions will disappear.

In the end, at least for me, it’s about relationships, helping others, and working hard. If, once I’ve left, I hear someone say, “Greg? He was a hell-of-a-guy” and says nothing about my technical achievements, that will be enough.

Hybrid Enhancements Across IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud

(Some of my hintervision thoughts are posted elsewhere. Here is an article from our Cloud Engagement Hub publication on Medium)

The goal of many enterprise clients is to be able to modernize key applications and run them wherever they want: On a private cloud in their own data center (where their sensitive data lives), on a public cloud (where they get scale, world-wide reach), or even better, on both private and public…where it becomes a true hybrid application taking advantage of the best of both environments.

In late March, IBM shared how clients could run their modernized applications in a hybrid environment across IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service in IBM Cloud. This essential capability, captured in the following video, showcases how a client can transform their application, where both development teams and cloud ops teams can both be delighted.

Watch: A Consistent Cloud Journey with IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud

Today, I am thrilled to share enhancements that make it even easier to create clusters, manage catalog content, and deploy developed apps across hybrid cloud environments. Specifically, with this latest enhancement of IBM Cloud Private 2.1.0.3, Fix Pack 1, users can extend a new or existing IBM Cloud Private deployment with the following capabilities:

  • Create additional Kubernetes clusters using a template from IBM Cloud Private
  • Curate which services developers have access to, and let them provision on either private or public clusters with self-service capability
  • Deploy a custom app into both private and public environments from the same developer environment

Create additional private and public Kubernetes clusters from your IBM Cloud Private Catalog

The first enhancement is the ability for any authorized user to provision a new IBM Cloud Private cluster or IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster.

Here’s what you will need:

  • IBM Cloud Private
  • IBM Cloud Automation Manager
  • IBM Cloud account (with proper authorization)
  • Apply IBM Cloud Private patch

For example, once you install IBM Cloud Automation Manager onto your IBM Cloud Private cluster, you can create a brokered service (with customized variables limiting and controlling what options are available) that will let any authorized user create the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster onto your IBM Cloud account. An optional VPN can be automatically deployed to securely connect the two clusters, if desired.

Figure 1: Multiple clusters created from one IBM Cloud Private cluster

Here are the steps you will follow. For each step, I’ve added a link to the Knowledge Center (product documentation) that provides step-by-step instructions.

First, install and open IBM Cloud Automation Manager.

Figure 2: IBM Cloud Private catalog entry for Cloud Automation Manager

Second, add a “Cloud Connection” to IBM Cloud that uses your credentials.

Figure 3: Select “Manage Connections” to create a new connection to IBM Cloud using your account to create the Kubernetes cluster.

This connection will use your IBM Cloud account’s API key to communicate between Cloud Automation Manager and IBM Cloud. Be aware that once you set this up, Cloud Automation Manager will use your account to create IBM Cloud resources. Be sure that your IBM Cloud account has the necessary user permissions and can support the billing for your estimated product usage.

Third, create a custom service using an IBM-provided template to deploy an IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster (with optional VPN connection) and publish it into the IBM Cloud Private catalog.

Figure 4: Select “Services” to create a new service in Cloud Automation Manager

This is really where you will harness the power of Cloud Automation Manager and its IBM-provided templates. Think of it this way: where in the past you would have to manually run commands or navigate a user interface to define the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, and then customize many details every time you provision a cluster, Cloud Automation Manager has provided all the details in a template. By creating this service, you provide a simple way to have your team provision a cluster when they need it, using the account (and limits) that you specify.

In addition to the previous link, here are some tips to creating the “Provision IKS Cluster” service (Figure 5):

Figure 5: Customizing parameters for your “Provision IKS Cluster” service

  1. Make cluster_name a service parameter so your user can specify it when they deploy.
  2. Specify private_vlan_id and public_vlan_id for the IBM Cloud region you want to deploy into. To find the values, run the following command in your IBM Cloud CLI (enter any location. In this example, ‘dal10’ is the location I want to deploy into): bx cs vlans dal10
  3. Make num_workers (the number of worker nodes for the cluster) a service parameter so your users can decide how many worker nodes their cluster needs. Note that this should be an array of the number of workers you authorize your users to select from. Maybe start with offering 2–5 worker nodes.
  4. Default machine_type so users can only select machines of the kind you default. To select your default, simply click the value column and all supported machine types will appear.

Note that you can optionally add a VPN template into your “Provision IKS Cluster” service so that you can privately communicate between your IBM Cloud Private cluster and your IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster. If you choose to add the optional VPN connection, there are some IBM Cloud Private instructions for installing StrongSwan VPN, and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service instructions and considerations to study.

Once you publish the service into the IBM Cloud Private catalog, you will allow other users a simplified way to create their own clusters.

Figure 6: IBM Cloud Private catalog with the service to provision IKS cluster that you just created

Fourth, deploy the “Provision IKS Cluster” service from the catalog. You’ll notice in Figure 7 that there are just a few parameters for the individual to fill out (the service you defined earlier filled in most of the defaults).

Figure 7: Deploying an IKS cluster from IBM Cloud Private

Now that your service is created, your development teams can deploy as many IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service clusters into the public cloud as they need.

Curate, to your enterprise standards, production services sourced from IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service into a single catalog.

The second enhancement is the ability to deploy production middleware into either IBM Cloud Private or IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, all from your IBM Cloud Private catalog. This enhancement, coupled with the new IBM Cloud Private capability to limit what users have access to in the catalog, allows a cloud admin to give a developer a curated view of what they can deploy. Further, with IBM Cloud Automation Manager’s brokered service support, the cloud admin can create a service with multiple plans, so when a developer selects a plan in their catalog, IBM Cloud Automation Manager will deploy the proper version of middleware that maps to the selected plan.

For example, you may want to let a user “Create a database,” but without burdening them with all the specifics that a database Helm chart requires. Further, you have specific versions in mind, depending on where they deploy and who the user is. For instance, you may want to have only “dev” versions or “production” versions of the middleware on certain clusters, or even an open source Postgres database in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. With this new enhancement, you can create a brokered service through IBM Cloud Automation Manager to present a simplified view for the user to select their desired plan, hiding all the gritty details so that they can answer a few questions, deploy what they want, and you can manage the database instances far easier.

Here are the steps you will follow. For each step, I’ve added a link to the Knowledge Center that provides step-by-step instructions.

First, for Db2, IBM MQ, and Liberty, download your production middleware content from Passport Advantage. If you want to use development versions for Db2, IBN MQ, and Liberty, those are already available in IBM Charts.

Second, import the production Helm chart and container image into each cloud. Each platform has a “Passport Advantage Importer” tool to simplify this step. Click here to import into IBM Cloud Private, and click here to import into IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. Note that once you import production versions of IBM MQ, Db2, and WebSphere Liberty, you are licensed to use them.

To import production middleware into IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, you can either store the Helm charts in your local file system, or you can upload them into a private Helm repository. If you want to upload the charts into a private Helm repository, you will need to first deploy one into your cluster. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service does not currently have a private Helm repository, so I recommend you install ChartMuseum, which will give you the needed private Helm repository in your IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster.

Third, open IBM Cloud Automation Manager in IBM Cloud Private to create the brokered database service, or whatever brokered service you want. As you did before, click “Create Service,” and this time, open “IBM Cloud Private,” which will show all the Helm charts you can add to this service.

Figure 8: Create a “Data Service” in Cloud Automation Manager

One concept that you need to know: Since the goal is to have one service deploy charts into either IBM Cloud Private or IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, the list of Helm charts listed in IBM Cloud Automation Manager needs to be the union of Helm charts available in both targets. For you, this means that your IBM Cloud Private cluster needs to add the Helm repo URL of the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster so that the charts show up in this list.

Fourth, now that you have your customized service created, you can curate (filter, limit) what services show up for your developer, Jane. As you can see from the Cloud Automation Manager capabilities above, you can surface most any service from any cloud to your developers, customize and limit what parameters they can edit, and now with IBM Cloud Private 2.1.0.3, you can filter the catalog so Jane can only see what you want her to.

For example, while earlier in Figure 6 the admin has 54 items in the catalog, Figure 9 shows that Jane can see only seven!

Figure 9: Filtered catalog view for “Jane” the developer. Notice “Database-Service” and “Provision-IKS-Cluster”.

To filter the catalog, add a team like “Application Developers” in the Manage > Teams view (Figure 10).

Figure 10: Showing teams in IBM Cloud Private

Once created, click the team name, and the “Resources” tab. This will show all resources the team is authorized to. What I really like is that teams can be authorized to a variety of resources across IBM Cloud Private:

  • Kubernetes namespace (for increased isolation and access control)
  • Helm repo (so devs can access only the collection of Helm charts you want)
  • Individual Helm charts
  • Individual brokered services

In Figure 11, you can see what application developers are authorized to. Notice that the database service we created previously has two plans, and the developers are authorized to both. However, you could authorize them to only one plan. This means that you could create one service and authorize portions to different teams…far easier to manage.

Figure 11: The resources available to application developers

Transform, develop, and deploy your application onto both IBM Cloud Private and IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

The third enhancement revolves around helping developers migrate WebSphere apps and then deploying them into IBM Cloud Private using a pipeline to multiple Kubernetes clusters.

Here’s what you will need:

  • IBM Cloud Private
  • IBM Transformation Advisor
  • Microclimate

For example, to migrate a WebSphere application, start by running Transformation Advisor from your IBM Cloud Private instance. Transformation Advisor provides a data collector to add next to your WebSphere app, and it will provide recommendations on how to migrate it into a containerized WebSphere Liberty runtime on IBM Cloud Private.

In Figure 12, Transformation Advisor shows the results of its analysis. As you can see, each file is shown, the issues (how complicated it would be to migrate), and a migration plan.

Figure 12: The resources available to application developers

In the migration plan for each file (Figure 13), Transformation Advisor shows all the deployment files it would create and provides a link to deploy the bundle.

Figure 13: The detailed migration plan for a specific bundle

To actually deploy the bundle, Transformation Advisor integrates with Microclimate. Microclimate is the end-to-end development environment that runs right inside IBM Cloud Private.

Figure 14 shows Microclimate and the projects that were created:

Figure 14: Microclimate and its projects

Once you select a project that you imported, you could update the Git repo with source code and soon you can update code, view logs, and even view app-level metrics like in Figure 15:

Figure 15: Coding and unit testing apps all within Microclimate

In fact, if you want to use one of the sample Microclimate apps , you can try it yourself.

Finally, to deploy the app to additional clusters (like a remote IBM Cloud Private or IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service), you can set up deployment pipelines additional clusters using these instructions.

Summary

As you can see, if you need to run your app in a hybrid environment that makes it easier for developers to provision services they need (wherever they may reside), and if your developers need faster ability to deploy across multiple Kubernetes clusters, these enhancements will be quite welcome since now, with IBM Cloud Private 2.1.0.3, Fix Pack 1, users can:

  • Create additional Kubernetes clusters using a template from IBM Cloud Private
  • Curate which services developers have access to, and let them provision on either private or public clusters with self-service capability
  • Deploy a custom app into both private and public environments from the same developer environment

I hope you give this a try, and if you need any help, contact IBM Cloud Private support here: http://ibm.biz/icpsupport

Resources:

Hybrid Modernization

Cloud Automation Manager

Passport Advantage — Production Middleware

IBM Cloud Private

Transformation Advisor

Microclimate

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service



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