IBM Cloud Pak® for Applications (CP4Apps) is an end-to-end hybrid cloud application platform, providing flexibility for deployments, building new cloud-native applications, refactoring and re-platforming existing applications. Designed to leverage a collection of application runtimes, modernization tools and a Kubernetes container platform to adapt to their landscape needs.
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.
JBoss EAP is subscription based/open source platform. It's very reliable and great for deploying high transaction Java based enterprise applications. It integrates well with third party components like mod_cluster and supports popular Java EE web-based frameworks such as Spring, Angular JS, jQuery Mobile, and Google Web Toolkit.
MOD_CLUSTER integration. JBoss EAP integrates pretty well with mod_cluster. This is an intelligent load balancer especially useful in highly clustered environments.
Supports enterprise-grade features such as high availability clustering, distributed caching, messaging etc.
Supports deployment in on-premise, virtual and hybrid cloud environments.
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.
Jboss CLI is a great tool but we had trouble using it to get values that are displayed on Jboss GUI. It also has limitations parsing the applications.xml files and we had to use a mix of jboss-cli and linux bash commands to automate certain application administrative tasks.
JBoss doesn't really provides performance tuning recommendations. It would have been nice if it could learn from the current demand vs current settings for things like connection pool, server configurations, garbage collection etc.
Usually, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is good at performance and well suited for high traffic Java EE-based applications, but we have faced hard times performance tuning it for our specific needs. The product would be nicer if they would add a performance diagnostic and recommendations feature to it.
Comparing IBM Cloud PAK for Applications against alternatives highlights its distinct advantages. Its robust support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments enables unmatched flexibility in application deployment, crucial for businesses seeking to leverage various cloud services. This contrasts with platforms that may limit their focus to a single-cloud approach or offer restricted multi-cloud capabilities.IBM Cloud PAK's seamless integration with AI and data analytics, particularly through IBM Watson, provides powerful tools for developing AI-driven applications. This integration is a key differentiator from competitors that might not offer as comprehensive AI and analytics tools, allowing businesses to easily incorporate advanced technologies into their applications.Furthermore, IBM Cloud PAK for Applications prioritizes ethical AI development and compliance with regulatory standards, aligning with OpenAI’s guidelines. This commitment is essential for organizations that value responsible AI practices and need to adhere to strict privacy and security regulations.The selection of IBM Cloud PAK for Applications was driven by its holistic approach to application development, offering a blend of flexibility, advanced technological integration, and a commitment to ethical standards, making it a superior choice for businesses focused on innovation while adhering to ethical and legal standards.
We have been able to migrate apps away from the expensive WAS-ND to the more cost-effective WAS-base without throwing away our WAS-ND licenses. With a 1:4 ratio of WAS-ND to WAS-base we've been able to we've been able to save in excess of 75% on licensing charges for these apps.
By having a license model based on VPC ratios (1:4:8 - WAS-ND:WAS-base:Liberty core) we've been able to move away from using license pooling resulting in over-allocating (i.e. wasting) CPU cores for each license pool, to using consolidated license pools hosting a combination of WAS-ND, WAS-base and Liberty-core. This has allowed us to reduce our licensing costs accordingly.
