IBM® SmartCloud® Essentials takes you through the basics of cloud computing and covers the wide range of cloud components, services, and solutions in the IBM® SmartCloud® portfolio. This portfolio offers cloud solutions ranging from public to private cloud and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS) solutions.
To make the concepts used in cloud computing more tangible, we zoom in to do a gradual deep-dive into one of IBM's public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud solutions; IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise. Throughout the book you will gradually build an understanding of the concepts and practical uses of IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise, entwined with building some hands-on experience along the way.
In the last chapter of the book, Chapter 6, Further Developments, we zoom out again to take a bird's eye view on what the future of cloud computing offered by IBM may be.
Chapter 1, IBM® SmartCloud®, covers the essentials of cloud computing and discovers what IBM has to offer in the cloud computing arena, guided by the IBM® SmartCloud® portfolio.
Chapter 2, IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise, makes it more pragmatic by introducing the similarly named IBM public cloud solution. In this chapter we introduce the cloud service, discover the resource model, and provide an overview of its basic and premium services.
Chapter 3, Getting Started, focuses on the popular uses of IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise and, exemplary for infrastructure cloud solutions in general, builds some hands-on experience by working with the SCE management console to get services provisioned.
Chapter 4, Advanced Use-cases, looks at advanced functions of IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise such as using the REST (and other) API, image management, securing resources, back up and restore, monitoring instances, and high availability.
Chapter 5, There's an Ecosystem for That, elaborates the off-the-shelf solutions in the public image catalog containing both IBM and IBM Business Partners software products.
Chapter 6, Further Developments, zooms out again to the level of abstraction we started with in Chapter 1, IBM® SmartCloud®, only to take a little peak into the future by discussing platform services on top of IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise, acquisitions, and other valuable sources of information.
Appendix, A Brief History, provides the full history of IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise in chronological order.
This book assumes that you have installed Eclipse™, only for using the deployment utility tool as described in Chapter 4, Advanced Use-cases. It can be downloaded from the website www.eclipse.org.
This book is for anyone who wants to get a grasp of what cloud computing is and what IBM is doing in the area of cloud computing. For this group the book covers the practical side of cloud computing in Chapter 1, IBM® SmartCloud®, and offers a peek into the near future in Chapter 6, Further Developments.
Second, the book is also intended for readers with a technical background, such as IT specialists and IT architects. For this group, Chapter 2 to Chapter 5 takes the reader through the cloud computing resource model, using IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise as an example, and gradually builds understanding of and experience with IBM® SmartCloud® Enterprise.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
… <Image> <ImageID>20025207</ImageID> <Name>Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3</Name> …
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The SCE management console, specifically on the Support page, where many resources are directly available or just one click away in the Documentation Library, Video Library, and Asset Catalog."
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