Cloud has evolved significantly from its roots in the shared services era of IBM mainframes in the 1960s and 1970s. While some parallels can be drawn, today’s cloud landscape emphasizes flexible capacity and pricing models over traditional outright purchases of computing resources like the IBM i platform. From the outset, the genius of the IBM i platform is that it is a completely integrated system, that included the OS, database, programming languages, application development tools, and security needed to deploy mission-critical applications that run a business, all in the box.
Thirty years on, the cloud has changed the nature of technology consumption forever, and in turn, applications, business models, and entire industries. With robust cloud offerings, the IBM i has changed with it.
Deciphering Cloud Architectures
There are many cloud architectures, and even more cloud providers. That trend is not likely to slow down, and the increase in complexity has grown exponentially. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on the three that are most consumed in the IBM i community: private, public, and hybrid clouds. A good place to start is with the authoritative definition of a cloud as provided by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). It describes these five key attributes: …..read more on IT Jungle.
