I’m finally back home after what feels like a very long week in Las Vegas at IBM’s InterConnect conference. I promised that I’d post my presentations on SlideShare and I’ll add a few comments here on how each session went.
After an Inner Circle session on Sunday, my first public session of the week was an introduction to containers with WebSphere traditional. This played to a full room which suggests that there is significant interest in the use of containers for existing workloads. Indeed, that was the point of the second half of the session, to describe scenarios where it may make sense to use containers with traditional WebSphere. That’s not to say that it always does and, during one-to-one sessions during the week, I found myself repeatedly cautioning customers against rushing in to the use of containers, particularly with ND, just for the sake of it.
My next session covered our new announcement around Microservice Builder. I’ll not say more here as I’ll cover this in a separate post.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to deliver this session on Liberty and IBM Containers as it clashed with another that I was presenting. As touched on briefly in this presentation, one of the other announcements at the conference was for support for Kubernetes in IBM Containers. There was lots of excitement around this and I urge you to go and check it out for yourself.
On Wednesday I had a joint presentation with Brian Paskin looking at options for scalability with Liberty and containers. This was very much Brian’s presentation though so I shan’t post it here. There was an accompanying lab in the afternoon that looked at Liberty collectives and at IBM Containers.
My last session of the week was looking at some of the options when choosing a container orchestration platform: from Liberty collectives, through Swarm and Docker Datacenter, and Kubernetes with IBM Spectrum Conductor for Containers and IBM Containers. Many customers I spoke to this week were looking for a single definitive answer here but my response for now is still very much “it depends”.