Welcome to another edition of Talsco Weekly

Data: A Hands On Guide: IBM Cloud Pak for Data. IBM Db2 now runs on AWS.
Open Source: A Quick Look at Kubernetes. Crash Course On The Value of Kubernetes.
Development: Node.js Security Best Practices. Deploying a Node.js app to the IBM i.
Cloud: Getting IBM i Data To The Cloud.

Data

A Hands On Guide: IBM Cloud Pak for Data

IBM Cloud Pak for Data is a unified, integrated, and collaborative data and AI platform that enables enterprises collect, organize, and analyze data and inject AI into business processes and applications. It aims to give deeper business insights for smarter business outcomes.

Get the Redbook.

IBM Db2 now runs on AWS

IBM announced its strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver IBM SaaS products in the AWS marketplace.

“Db2 empowers developers, data engineers, DBAs and enterprise architects to run low-latency transactions and real-time analytics for the most demanding workloads.”

“IBM Db2 Database — our cloud-native relational database — is built on IBM Db2’s decades of innovation in bringing data governance, data security, low-latency transactions and continuous availability to your mission-critical applications.”

Open Source

A Quick Look at Kubernetes

Is “your organization is an early adopter” or are you “just getting started” with Kubernetes? Either way the “possibilities for automation, optimization, and innovation are endless with Kubernetes.”

Kubernetes is changing the way companies do business. As a technology, it has been around since 2014.

If you want to learn more, here is a 15-minute overview on Kubernetes.

Crash Course On The Value of Kubernetes

What is Kubernetes?

“Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates deployment, management, and scaling of applications.”

“Kubernetes and the broader container ecosystem” has matured into a general-purpose platform that in a way is replacing Virtual Machines (VMs).

What do Kubernetes allow you to do?

“Kubernetes and the broader container ecosystem” is a PaaS, of sorts, that takes care of infrastructure and operation-type tasks, which allows development teams to focus on coding.

Here are some example “use cases for Kubernetes.”

What are containers?

They are “lightweight, executable application components that combine application source code with all the operating system (OS) libraries and dependencies required to run the code in any environment.”

Comparing traditional infrastructure to VMs and Containers

“Traditional Infrastructure” applications run on a physical server and grab all the resources they can get.

“Virtual machines (VMs)” are servers abstracted from the actual computer hardware, enabling you to run multiple VMs on one physical server or a single VM that spans more than one physical server. VMs make better use of resources and are more cost-effective to scale than traditional infrastructure.

“Containers” offer the same isolation, scalability, and disposability of VMs, but because they don’t carry the payload of their own OS instance, they’re lighter weight (that is, they take up less space) than VMs. They’re more resource-efficient — they let you run more applications on fewer machines (virtual and physical), with fewer OS instances.

The rest of this article dives deep into the nuances of Kubernetes as well as what it can do. You can read more about it here.

Development

Node.js Security Best Practices

If you are an IBM i developer diving into Node.js, here is a detailed guide on how to secure a Node.js application.

Overview

Best practices: A simplified condensed way to see the best practices. Use this issue or this guideline as the starting point. It is important to note that this document is specific to Node.js. If you are looking for something broader, consider OSSF Best Practices.

Attacks explained: Illustrate and document in plain English with some code examples (if possible) of the attacks that we mention in the threat model.

Third-Party Libraries: Define threats (typo-squirting attacks, malicious packages…) and best practices regarding node modules dependencies and more.

Deploying a Node.js app to the IBM i

Here is a basic video tutorial of how to write a simple Node.js application and deploy it to the IBM i.

Cloud

Getting IBM i Data To The Cloud

While there are no IBM i runtimes in the public cloud as of today, IBM i shops are still seeing value by migrating their Db2 for i data into the cloud, using technologies such as Apache Kafka and Apache Camel, as well as updating IBM ETL solution.

It’s no wonder, the transition to the cloud is predicted to account for half of IT spending by the year 2025.

Past vs Present

In the past, organizations used Netezza, a Teradata machine or even an Apache Hadoop cluster to process and analyze data. Now, they are leveraging “cheap and massive data lakes running on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure as the platform for their data analytics efforts.”

Cloud-native architectures allow for the separation of storage and compute where you can quickly spin up and shut down an “Azure Synapse, Databricks, or Snowflake instances to crunch data and build machine learning models.”

While IBM i shops can’t yet provision CPWs in public clouds to crunch data natively, they can still use cloud services like OLAP, advanced analytics, streaming analytics, machine learning, and AI.

There are a number of ETL products that IBM i shops have used for a long time from various vendors such as, “IBM, Informatica, Talend, Fortra (previously HelpSytsems), and Matillion.”

Now there is another option, “DataMigrator.”

IBM’s DataMigrator database management tool has been upgraded with the release of Db2 Web Query version 2.4. The add-on was originally unveiled back in 2015 but just recently received a major revamp as part of an IBM i Tech Refresh.

If you want to learn more, John Westcott, a Db2 for i analytics consultant, gives a “compelling overview of DataMigrator’s low-code and no-code data transformation capabilities, as well as its new cloud streaming features in this week’s issue of IT Jungle.”

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