Re: Recommendations for a newcomer?

I ask them to provide concrete examples of development being done ...

Last year we began offering cloud services to new customers. I'm pleased by what we've learned from it, and our prospects for the future. Our IBM i applications are more reliable and perform better than those of our competition. We've been migrating schools off Windows and MS SQL Server to IBM i on Power.

We use the Internet's Domain Name System to assist with request routing and load balancing. We use sub-domain naming to separate different client workloads: 

aa.domain.com 
ab.domain.com 
ac.domain.com 
... 
an.domain.com 

where "aa" through "an ..." represent different clients. Clients use their sub-domain name to access their own HTTP server instance, their own Web Portal Instance, their own Login prompts, and their own Web Application Environments. We use HTTP "virtual hosts" to map different host names to different HTTP server instances.

Client web application environments consists of their own libraries, their own IFS directories, their own IBM i subsystems, their own IBM i Jobs. All workloads are separated and neatly organized under IBM i, which makes them easy to manage.

We don't need to partition the box. We don't need an HMC. We don't need to manage separate copies of IBM i licensed programs nor separate copies of our applications on separate virtual machine instances. We don't need to manage software "images". 

Native workload management allocates resources according to IBM i subsystem configurations, shared storage pool configuration, Job priorities, etc. There's NO need for an external Hypervisor. 

For daily backups we take down each client's web application environment separately for just a few minutes while we save their libraries. While one client environment is down the others are running. We FTP their backups to an offsite location and store them in directory structures associated with their client ID. 

Native IBM i workloads running under IBM i is the only architecture that I'm aware of that could manage this type of complexity, and offer these types of interfaces without partitioning. IBM i does it more efficiently than any other architecture.


-Nathan.