Many enterprises today are getting advantages out of moving workloads into the public cloud.
They're building cognitive applications, they're scaling them on demand, and they're improving the
speed of their development through as a service API-based consumption on the public cloud. But
the reality is many workloads have not moved to the public cloud yet many of those workloads are
from regulated industries, they have security and compliance requirements, or performance and
latency requirements, that make it challenging to physically move those applications into a public
cloud data center. And what many organizations really want is all of the agility benefits of
public cloud, but the flexibility to run those workloads wherever they need them: on-premises
in their existing data centers, in multiple public cloud providers around the world, or at the edge
of the network closer to the applications and data sources that they need to process.
Public cloud is evolving to satisfy this requirement with a new concept called
“Distributed Cloud”. So, the heart of IBM Cloud Satellite is the notion of IBM Cloud Services
managed anywhere. When you consume capabilities on the IBM Cloud today you have a catalog of over 130
services that you can use to build and run your applications - everything from infrastructure to
Kubernetes and OpenShift databases, DevOps tools, and frameworks for AI machine learning and IOT.
All of those services are available as APIs that you can provision on demand, and you can consume
and use to build your applications. With IBM Cloud Satellite, we're extending that catalog
of services and enabling it to be consumed in the exact same way, through the same APIs,
in locations outside of IBM Cloud regions. So, you can now consume an OpenShift cluster in your
data center, or AI machine learning framework in your factory. You can use those capabilities in a
consistent way wherever the application workload needs to run. You can also use software - things
like IBM Cloud Paks and open-source capabilities - and deploy them in a consistent way across
any environment. One of the advantages of this approach is that the public cloud becomes kind of
the central management, or control plane, for all of your distributed workloads. You have a single
console that you can log into with IBM Cloud that allows you to provision resources, provision
cloud services, configure them, provision your applications, and manage them in a consistent
way across this diverse set of environments. You get a single way to do security. You also get,
of course, common observability - logging and monitoring, and dashboards and alerts,
that allow you to monitor the workloads that you're running in a consistent way across all
these environments. We're also doing some work in Satellite to help you with inventory and change
management. So, part of the power of Satellite is this common control plane or single pane of glass
that allows you to manage your applications across a diverse set of environments. Now, how does this
work? Kind of the key idea within Satellite that we're introducing is the notion of a location.
A location is a way to define, to IBM Cloud, a place outside of IBM Cloud where you want to be
able to deploy and consume cloud services. It is a collection of infrastructure that you own
that we're going to use on your behalf to run cloud services. That location is essentially
a collection of Linux hosts, of virtual machines or physical machines, that get arranged together
into a pool of resources, that get managed automatically by Satellite, and that get used,
by us, to provision services. So, when you, let's say, you want to create a Satellite location in
your data center, you can provision a set of Linux machines within that data center. You register
those Linux machines with IBM Cloud as a location, and once that collection is registered with IBM
Cloud Satellite, you now see that location kind of as like a custom region within your cloud account,
where you can now deploy cloud services. So, if you want to create a Postgres database,
define a DevOps tool chain, or create an OpenShift cluster - when you provision that
cluster through services in the cloud, that custom location you just defined in your data center
will be a location that you can select when you provision that resource.
And so, locations is a really simple concept where you're able to take any Linux infrastructure and
make it available as a place to run cloud services. Now, one of the advantages of
this idea of a location is it really provides a tremendous flexibility. IBM Cloud Satellite is
built on top of Kubernetes and OpenShift as the common infrastructure abstraction that we use
to allow you to consume cloud services in any infrastructure. And by using OpenShift as that
abstraction layer, we can support a variety of infrastructures underneath a Satellite location.
You can bring your own custom infrastructure in your data center, physical or virtual
servers. You can use your account on another public cloud like amazon, or azure,
or google - and consume that infrastructure, and arrange it into a location that's used by
IBM Cloud for running cloud services. Now, since those locations, those services and applications,
are managed by IBM Cloud, we, of course, need a connection back to the cloud to help
us manage those things - and that connection is provided by a component called “Satellite
link”. And the idea of Satellite link is to give you the transparent visibility to all the
data that's flowing back and forth between the cloud and that location, and to give you
control over what applications and resources are exposed in those locations. So, these two ideas,
of location and link, provide the fundamental new concepts that Satellite introduces to IBM Cloud
to give you the power of services anywhere. We're also going to provide some optimized solutions.
Fully integrated rack systems both from IBM and from partners, and as-a-service infrastructure
capabilities where we can run the entire stack for you from hardware through infrastructure,
and up into platform and SaaS applications. And so, you can consume infrastructure either with
what you have, you can build new environments, or you can run multi-cloud environments
across IBM Cloud and other public cloud providers. So, those are kind of the core ideas in Satellite:
locations and link allow us to extend our cloud catalog services to any location,
giving you the power of cloud, and the power of IBM Cloud, anywhere in the world that you need
it. All you need is some Linux infrastructure and IBM does the rest. Thanks a lot.