From JTC to JTC in two decades

Glad to share that I completed twenty years with IBM. Took few mins to reflect my technical journey, career and alignment to IBM's Strategy over these two decades.

I joined the Java Technology Center (JTC) in the IBM India Software Lab (ISL) in Dec 1999. The mission of JTC was to deliver Java runtimes and SDK on multiple server platforms. I primarily worked on building and supporting Java (JVM and JDK) on AIX and Linux leveraging my prior experience on UNIX/C. When competition were shipping Java on couple of platforms, we as IBM supported JVM on multiple system architectures. (32/64 bit architectures across xSeries, pSeries, zSeries and even HP and Sun hardwares).

Trying to understand IBM's strategy at that time - it was about creating an On DemandOperating Environment (ODOE) for clients. It meant putting a consistent layer of OS and runtime with a virtualisation layer that scales with customer's demand and is resilient. The hardened Operating system(OS) was built by our folks from Linux Technology Center (LTC) and we from JTC built the Java runtimes. With this strategy, IBM could run our entire software stack on any hardware systems and get the customers applications working running on top of this.

On Demand Operating Environment is the new normal with Linux and Java is the common denominator

The next 10 years saw the evolution of Operating Environment aligning with business objectives to create OnDemand Businesses. The need was for business flexibility through integration of people, processes and information within and beyond the enterprise. This meant the operating environment must be open standards based in the three primary areas of Integration, Automation and Virtualisation.

The application architectures started anchoring on SOA with loosely coupled open standards based services to improve the resilience of the business process. Web services, XML, SOAP, and HTTP became ubiquitous. From JTC, I joined the SOA Technology Practice team, to help customers understand the patterns of Service-Oriented Architecture which were beautifully captured by IBM Redbooks. Business Process Management tools, runtimes and technologies like the IBM Enterprise Service Bus, Websphere Portal, IBM WebSphere Process Server and IBM WebSphere Business Monitors made the SOA real. Virutalization and Automation was not the only answer to address complexity of systems management to enable better use of assets, improved availability and resiliency, and reduced operating costs. Simplifies deployment and improves use of computing resources by hiding the details of the underlying hardware and system software paved way for adoption of Cloud.

SOA is the new normal and Virtualization and Automation is the common denominator

The onDemand Operating Environment evolved to Cloud Operating Environment (CloudOE) which then eventually became Cloud. I joined the IBM Cloud team to start building the software components required for customers to build their private cloud. Went through the evolution of Tivoli Service Automation Manager, IBM Service Delivery Manager, IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, IBM Smart Cloud Enterprise +. When SOA+ Private Cloud started becoming business as usual, there was a set of innovation happening on the Public Cloud.

Security was the primary concern for customers to move to cloud. I joined the IBM Security team to understand and address the security requirements in the IaaS and PaaS layers. Worked to create the point of view and technologies to secure the IBM SoftLayer and IBM Bluemix environments. I led several of the integrations with security tools like QRadar Portfolio with VMware, Amazon, Openstack, IBM Cloud. Again it was based on open standards like CADF to enable visibility into the multicloud environments.

Again if workload is moving to cloud, we had to ensure security is also moving to cloud. So I also moved back to IBM Cloud to build some of the security services for IBM Cloud . As the Security Architect for IBM Cloud, led the architecture definition of IBM Cloud Security Advisor and IBM Cloud Certificate Manager services. Working with SMEs across divisions created the Cloud Security Reference Architecture that discusses the cloud security use cases and provides prescriptive guidance. The patterns includes use cases for identity access management, data protection and hybrid visibility assurance on the cloud.

Cloud is the new normal and containers is the common denominator

Building native services for Cloud, exposed me to various new architectural styles and runtime components. Microservices is becoming the architecture style for Cloud which prescribes building large complex software applications using many fine grained services. These microservices are narrowly focused, independently deployable, loosely coupled, language agnostic services fulfilling a business capability. Lot of the technology components to support this architecture style includes containers, kubernetes, serverless (cloud functions) with microservices written in Node.js, Python, Java, Spring with NoSQL databases and responsive frontends. Dev-Ops also became an integral requirement of the new world where continuous integration and delivery was required for deploying to Cloud. This also involved learning some of the changes in methods, practices and culture. Contributed my learning of integrating security to build Dev-Sec-Ops to the IBM Cloud Adoption Playbook.

Hybrid Multicloud is the new normal. Red Hat OpenShift built on Kubernetes is the new common denominator.

"Eighty percent of the critical workloads is still to be moved into a hybrid multicloud environment" and IBM calls the move Chapter 2 of Cloud. To help clients with this journey and digital transformation, I've joined the Services team for Cloud Advise team focusing on complex integration, application modernization and ensuring security is integrated into every layer of the solution.

For me, this is about doing all the things I did in 20 years, all over again now for the Hybrid Multicloud world. This journey with some amazing colleagues and leaders from JTC (Java Technology Center) to JTC (Journey to Cloud) over two decades has been more engaging than the destinations. Look forward to continuing this interesting journey to the next decade.

P.S. I used https://ibm.co/sreek to share my learnings on Java, SOA, Cloud, Security and Microservices during the last 20 years. Unfortunately that platform is going away today. Look forward to using this LinkedIn channel to share the new learnings in the next decade