Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling vs. IBM Cloud Pak for Applications

[Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling] is simple to set up and pretty self-explanatory. Never had issues around scaling up or down. [Now] we won't need to guess the capacity for our apps or services. The both scaling, up and down is simply perfect, you can actually stop checking every time for resources because this tool takes care of everything

Incentivized

IBM Cloud Pak for Applications is clearly suitable for modernizing the WebSphere runtime from the heavy, complex and expensive WAS-ND, and to a lesser extent WAS-base, to the super simple, fast and lightweight WebSphere Liberty runtime. I guarantee, once you start using Liberty you'll never look back. Enough cannot be said about how awesome Transformation Advisor is. The output analysis it produces, along with the migration plan and associated artifacts, considerably simplifies both the decision-making process surrounding modernization and subsequent implementation. Without TA we would've made bad decisions by blindly picking unsuitable apps for moving from WAS to Liberty. Using the results from TA we've excluded multiple WAS apps from our immediate plans to migrate to Liberty, saving time and effort that probably would have resulted in a failed migration. We recently used Transformation Advisor to help us successfully migrate an app from Tomcat to WebSphere Liberty. We needed to make some changes to the Tomcat app, but TA helped highlight these required changes. Without TA I'm not sure we would have succeeded.

Incentivized

• Dynamic scaling can be configured to respond to a wide variety of metrics and alerts
• Predictive scaling allows one to get ahead of high traffic events rather than simply reacting to them
• Health checks are configurable based on the needs of your application and architecture

Incentivized

• WebSphere Liberty for lighter footprint
• Transformation Advisor
• Mono2Micro
• Customer can benefit from their investment by optimizing license offerings in IBM Cloud Pak for Applications

Incentivized

• Sometimes, Auto scaling takes time to spin up your instances if your traffic is so high in short span of time.
• And, Auto scaling can be more efficient if we have only Load balancer in our architecture.
• It has some limitations on setting up the Auto scaling infra.

Incentivized

• While the licensing is considerably simplified than it used to be, I still find it somewhat confusing. For example, WebSphere Liberty Core has an 8:1 VPC ratio. This is clear when dealing with VMs but it is still not clear to me as to whether we get an 8:1 ratio when running on OpenShift or whether we need to purchase additional OpenShift licenses to support running WebSphere Liberty Core in OpenShift.
• Not so much related to IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, but while Transformation Advisor is an indispensable tool to help modernize to the WebSphere Liberty runtime, I wish we could run it against WebSphere Liberty itself. The reason being, we are now using TA as a single repository for our configurations. TA also highlights many potential issues when migrating to Liberty; these issues may also be applicable for apps already running in Liberty, we just don't know it yet.

Incentivized

Usability is good since we already know how AWS works. For those that are new it might be a little bit confusing at the beginning but they are improving it at a fast pace. Even though AWS keeps changing the user interface constantly, it is still powerful, understandable and easy to use. For technical people, they still offer the CLI.

Incentivized

The platform works as is. The help and tutorials on the help page can help you to setup the entire platform without problems, and also provides help on a huge variety of problems. Amazon also provides support plans. We have the basic support plan, but Amazon offers three support tiers, and we know that it works perfect.

Incentivized

The operating system, CPU, RAM, and storage may be constructed in any configuration and readily altered after the build. The most important factor is the "sense of security."Problems may arise once every several years, but there is a significant difference when discussing how to cope with hardware problems in the local age.

Our customer mission-critical core banking applications like Temenos T24 run on best of the breed IBM WebSphere Application Server which is java based-application server. IBM has kept up the promise of providing support, fixpack, and any update. As far as I know, at least by 2030, IBM is committed to continue with WHE which gives customers confidence in their current investments.

Incentivized

• Has helped increase service availability, which has contributed to a positive NPS from customers, leading to businesses maintaining current customers and enrolling more customers.
• Has enabled businesses to deploy applications quickly that contribute to improved customer service.
• Engineers can now focus more on product development rather than infrastructure issues.

Incentivized

• Increased Development Efficiency
• Cost Reduction in Infrastructure Management
• Enhanced Application Performance and Reliability

Incentivized