Talk:IBM Cloud

Major re-write of IBM Cloud
I am proposing a major re-write as this article, IBM Cloud, as it is quite outdated and, in my opinion, missing several key sections (such as outages and topology). I'd like to keep the introduction and "See also" sections but replace the rest with the content below. The "history" section is taken from Bluemix, an article which should be retired/redirected back to this article. As I am an IBM employee, there is a conflict of interest and am requesting feedback.
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: Obvious PR and lack of originality with the history part. Quetstar (talk) 21:28, 31 August 2021 (UTC)
 * I reached out to Quetstar for follow-up but mentioned an indefinite break from COI requests. Anyone else want to help? --Xsantolaria (talk) 10:27, 22 November 2021 (UTC)
 * @Xsantolaria You should make a separate COI request so that editors can see your proposed changes. Quetstar (talk) 22:48, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

Services
As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 130 services including compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, machine learning, and developer tools. The most popular services include the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service (IKS), Red Hat OpenShift (ROKS), Watson Assistant, Watson Studio, IBM Cloud Object Storage, and Cloudant.

Initial launch of Bluemix (2013-2016)
In June 2013, IBM acquired SoftLayer, a public cloud platform, to serve as the foundation for its IaaS offering. Bluemix was announced for public beta in February 2014 after having been developed since early 2013. . Bluemix was based on the open source Cloud Foundry project and ran on SoftLayer infrastructure. IBM announced the general availability of the Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering in July 2014. Bluemix supported several programming languages including Java, Node.js, Go, PHP, Swift, Python, Ruby Sinatra, Ruby on Rails and can be extended to support other languages such as Scala through the use of buildpacks.

By April 2015, Bluemix included a suite of over 100 cloud-based development tools "including social, mobile, security, analytics, database, and IoT (internet of things). Bluemix had grown to 83,000 users in India with growth of approximately 10,000 users each month.

A year after announcement, Bluemix had made little headway in the cloud-computing platform space relative to its competition, and remained substantially behind market leaders Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. By August 2016, little had changed in market acceptance of the Bluemix offering.

In February 2016, IBM Bluemix includes IBM's Function as a Service (FaaS) system, or Serverless computing offering, that is built using open source from the Apache OpenWhisk incubator project largely credited to IBM for seeding. This system, equivalent to Amazon Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, Oracle Cloud Fn or Google Cloud Functions, allows calling of a specific function in response to an event without requiring any resource management from the developer. .

Re-brand to IBM Cloud (2017–Present)
In May 2017 IBM released Kubernetes support as the IBM Bluemix Container Service, later renamed to the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS). . IKS was built using the open source Kubernetes project. This system, equivalent to Amazon Web Services EKS, Microsoft Azure AKS, or Google Cloud GKE, aims to provide a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts. In October 2017, IBM announced that they would rebrand their cloud as IBM Cloud brand, merging all components, thus retiring the Bluemix and Softlayer brands. In March 2018, IBM launched an industry first managed Kubernetes service on bare metal. In August 2019, 3 weeks after the close of Red Hat acquisition, IBM launched a managed Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.

Significant service outages

 * On June 9, 2020, IBM Cloud suffered a major outage that hit 80 data centres globally for over three hours. . An investigation determined that an external network provider flooded the IBM Cloud network with incorrect routing, resulting in severe congestion of traffic and impacted IBM Cloud services and data centres.

Availability and topology
IBM Cloud is comprised of 60 data centers available in 19 countries on 6 continents. . IBM Cloud data centers in Americas (Dallas, Houston, Mexico, Montreal, San Jose, Sao Paulo, Toronto, and Washington DC), Europe (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Milan, Oslo, and Paris), and Asia Pacific (Chennai, Hong Kong, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo).

Environmental impact
In 2021, IBM announced it would achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. To achieve its net zero goal IBM will both reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and procure electricity from renewable resources.

Stevemar ca (talk) 02:11, 31 August 2021 (UTC)

Merger Discussion
Request received to merge articles: Bluemix into IBM_Cloud; dated: {09/2021}. Proposer's Rationale: Bluemix has been renamed to IBM Cloud for several years now, having two articles is confusing to the reader and is causing unnecessary churn and updates. See references and. Discuss here. Stevemar ca (talk) 04:27, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Additional context.

I propose to merge Bluemix into IBM_Cloud. I think that the content in the Bluemix article should be merged into the IBM_Cloud article. A primary reason for this proposal is because Bluemix has been renamed to IBM Cloud for several years now. See references and.

Another reason is because having two separate pages is, in my opinion, confusing to the reader. The Bluemix page references IBM Cloud several times and even begins by saying "IBM Bluemix, rebranded IBM Cloud in 2017 ..." with a link to IBM Cloud, and vice-versa with the IBM Cloud page referencing Bluemix. A single article explaining the evolution and history of the service would provide a better experience. I started an initial talk about how a "History" section could look like over here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:IBM_Cloud#Major_re-write_of_IBM_Cloud with the content from the Bluemix page included.

As I am an IBM employee I have a conflict of interest and am requesting the merger as a proposal rather than directly editing the page. Thanks! Stevemar ca (talk) 03:15, 3 September 2021 (UTC)


 * Support. This does appear to be the case. Suggest IBM Cloud be made the canonical page, with Bluemix a redirect. I'm willing to assist in performing this merge. No coffee, please. (talk) 01:09, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

This article needs a complete re-haul. Using the AWS one as a template.
Following-up on previous request from ex-colleague to partially re-write this article. It was suggested to me to re-submit a COI request as previous editor is no longer active on COI requests. Thanks!


 * What I think should be changed (include citations):


 * Yes check.svg Done 15 (talk) 14:24, 3 January 2022 (UTC)

Services
As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 130 services including compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, machine learning, and developer tools. The most popular services include the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service (IKS), Red Hat OpenShift (ROKS), Watson Assistant, Watson Studio, IBM Cloud Object Storage, and Cloudant.

Initial launch of Bluemix (2013-2016)
In June 2013, IBM acquired SoftLayer, a public cloud platform, to serve as the foundation for its IaaS offering. Bluemix was announced for public beta in February 2014 after having been developed since early 2013. . Bluemix was based on the open source Cloud Foundry project and ran on SoftLayer infrastructure. IBM announced the general availability of the Bluemix Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering in July 2014. Bluemix supported several programming languages including Java, Node.js, Go, PHP, Swift, Python, Ruby Sinatra, Ruby on Rails and can be extended to support other languages such as Scala through the use of buildpacks.

By April 2015, Bluemix included a suite of over 100 cloud-based development tools "including social, mobile, security, analytics, database, and IoT (internet of things). Bluemix had grown to 83,000 users in India with growth of approximately 10,000 users each month.

A year after announcement, Bluemix had made little headway in the cloud-computing platform space relative to its competition, and remained substantially behind market leaders Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. By August 2016, little had changed in market acceptance of the Bluemix offering. In February 2016, IBM Bluemix includes IBM's Function as a Service (FaaS) system, or Serverless computing offering, that is built using open source from the Apache OpenWhisk incubator project largely credited to IBM for seeding. This system, equivalent to Amazon Lambda, Microsoft Azure Functions, Oracle Cloud Fn or Google Cloud Functions, allows calling of a specific function in response to an event without requiring any resource management from the developer. .

Re-brand to IBM Cloud (2017–Present)
In May 2017 IBM released Kubernetes support as the IBM Bluemix Container Service, later renamed to the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS). . IKS was built using the open source Kubernetes project. This system, equivalent to Amazon Web Services EKS, Microsoft Azure AKS, or Google Cloud GKE, aims to provide a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts. In October 2017, IBM announced that they would rebrand their cloud as IBM Cloud brand, merging all components, thus retiring the Bluemix and Softlayer brands. In March 2018, IBM launched an industry first managed Kubernetes service on bare metal. In August 2019, 3 weeks after the close of Red Hat acquisition, IBM launched a managed Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.

Customer base
- In 2019, it has been reported that IBM has once again partnered with the United States Tennis Association (USTA) and they're using new AI-powered tools during the US Open to deliver AI-generated highlights, real-time stats and match analysis, as well as an onsite experience center where attendees can experience AI in action.

Significant service outages

 * On June 9, 2020, IBM Cloud suffered a major outage that hit 80 data centers globally for well over three hours. . An investigation determined that an external network provider flooded the IBM Cloud network with incorrect routing, resulting in severe congestion of traffic and impacted IBM Cloud services and data centers.

Availability and topology
IBM Cloud is comprised of 60 data centers available in 19 countries on 6 continents. . IBM Cloud data centers in Americas (Dallas, Houston, Mexico, Montreal, San Jose, Sao Paulo, Toronto, and Washington DC), Europe (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Milan, Oslo, and Paris), and Asia Pacific (Chennai, Hong Kong, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo).

Environmental impact
In 2021, IBM announced it would achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. To achieve its net zero goal IBM will both reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and procure electricity from renewable resources.


 * Why it should be changed: Outdated and incomplete content. Starting small and iterating as we go.

Xsantolaria (talk) 12:31, 26 November 2021 (UTC)


 * Hi, I have collapsed the rewrites and copied the more recent one to User:15/Experiments/Quick. For future reference, it's good to store large rewrites in your WP:USERSPACE, although I don't think it's documented anywhere in the COI edit request guidelines. It makes reviewing and editing requests easier and avoids making the article talk page difficult to navigate. A couple of points:
 * The services paragraph is partially unsourced.
 * The draft relies too much on primary (eg company press releases, blog posts etc.) sources. Ideally, everything is sourced with an independent source. The reason we do this is because Wikipedia is supposed to reflect what secondary, not primary sources say. We also don't want company PR to skew the coverage.
 * Hope that helps. You are free to edit User:15/Experiments/Quick and improve the draft. 15 (talk) 22:28, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you - I've been editing the page you created. Let me know how you want to proceed to publish the changed to the official IBM Cloud page and any additional changes that I need to make. Thanks again! Xsantolaria (talk) 13:53, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Merger Request (SoftLayer)
I propose merging the SoftLayer article into this one. The SoftLayer article notes that the SL products are now known as IBM Cloud, and the resulting merged article will not be too large. Much of the SoftLayer article is now historical. Vt320 (talk) 00:27, 30 December 2021 (UTC)
 * ✅ Klbrain (talk) 11:14, 17 April 2022 (UTC)