As more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, enterprises are in search of the right cloud services to best suit business and application needs, while avoiding vendor lock-in. Gartner predicts, “By 2021, over 75% of midsize and large organizations will have adopted a multi-cloud and/or hybrid IT strategy.” Which is why — in our mission to help customers on their modernization journey — we aim to meet customers where they are, and help companies flexibly navigate a world of multiple vendors, sprawling environments, and varying toolsets. Through our robust set of APIs, we constantly see customers integrating with cloud-native services including mobile, IoT and machine learning.
Building on this interoperability and increasing our commitment to the open source community, we are excited to announce that through our partnership with HashiCorp, customers can now use the Skytap Provider for Terraform to provision and manage traditional application environments and VMs running in Skytap Cloud.
Much like the evolution of physical servers to virtualization, the journey to the cloud doesn’t happen overnight. As business-critical applications move from solely residing in legacy datacenters to dynamic cloud environments, IT operations have to shift from managing physical servers to adopting new automation and provisioning tools to manage a range of cloud-based infrastructure and services. While cloud services are fairly easy to provision, consistency and management of complete cloud infrastructure is a challenge. This is where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) was born. IaC enables infrastructure and services for an application to be defined and managed in a declarative way. HashiCorp Terraform helps organizations adopt IaC by allowing operators to provision, manage, and destroy infrastructure on demand through a single configuration file, helping to control common challenges like cloud spend and sprawl.
For our customers, whether they are replicating their datacenter or modernizing traditional applications, the Skytap provider for Terraform enables automatic provisioning of x86 and IBM Power resources in Skytap Cloud. As enterprises introduce additional cloud services and resources from hyper-scale clouds like IBM, Azure, AWS and Google, Terraform offers providers to incorporate those services as part of a single workflow. This allows Terraform to act as a single source for any application infrastructure and any services across multiple clouds.
To get started with Terraform in Skytap Cloud we have provided these resources:
- Learn Terraform
- Skytap Provider Documentation
- Skytap Provider GitHub repository
- Blog: Using Terraform to create AIX LPARs By John Bradshaw – Skytap Principal Architect
“Predicts 2019: Increasing Reliance on Cloud Computing Transforms IT and Business Practices,” Gartner, December 2018
