IBM Cloud

IBM Cloud#

IBM Cloud combines what used to be SoftLayer (bare metal, classic VMs) with the post-acquisition Red Hat stack (OpenShift, Ansible, Linux), Watson AI services, and IBM’s mainframe-adjacent offerings (z/OS Cloud). The operator meets it on enterprise estates with existing IBM contracts, mainframe modernisation work, and OpenShift-anchored deployments.

Account model#

  • Account, the unit of billing and identity.

  • Resource Group, in-account grouping for IAM and tagging.

  • Account hierarchy through Enterprise accounts for multi-account billing.

  • IAM unifies the modern surface; classic infrastructure has a separate, legacy access model still in places.

Catalog at a glance#

Layer

Headline services

Compute

VPC virtual servers, Bare Metal Servers on VPC, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS), Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud (ROKS), Code Engine (serverless containers and jobs), Functions.

Storage

Cloud Object Storage (S3-compatible), Block Storage for VPC, File Storage, Cloud Backup.

Database

Db2 on Cloud, Databases for PostgreSQL / MySQL / Redis / MongoDB / Elasticsearch, Cloudant (CouchDB), Db2 Warehouse.

Networking

VPC, Cloud Load Balancers, Cloud Internet Services (Cloudflare-backed CDN / WAF / DNS), Direct Link.

Identity

IAM, Key Protect, Hyper Protect Crypto Services (HSM), Secrets Manager.

AI / ML

watsonx.ai (foundation models), watsonx.data, Watson NLP / Speech / Translator, Watson Studio.

Mainframe-adjacent

z/OS Connect, Wazi as a Service (z/OS dev / test in cloud).

CLI and SDKs#

The ibmcloud CLI with per-service plugins (ibmcloud is for VPC infrastructure, ibmcloud ks for Kubernetes, ibmcloud cr for container registry).

$ ibmcloud login --sso
$ ibmcloud target -r us-south -g default
$ ibmcloud is instances
$ ibmcloud ks cluster ls
$ ibmcloud cr image-list
$ ibmcloud cos buckets

Regions and zones#

Six geographic regions with multi-zone regions (MZR) inside each. Bare-metal capacity is broader than the hyperscalers in some markets (telco, financial, public sector).

When to pick IBM Cloud#

  • The estate runs OpenShift and the operator wants vendor support from the company that owns it.

  • Mainframe modernisation work where IBM’s z/OS tooling is the bridge.

  • Watson / watsonx AI workloads on the IBM stack.

  • Regulated workloads needing IBM’s specific compliance posture (FFIEC, HIPAA, FedRAMP Moderate).

When to pick something else#

  • Greenfield workloads with no IBM-specific dependency; the catalog and ecosystem at AWS / Azure / GCP is larger.

  • OpenShift workloads where Red Hat’s own managed offerings (ROSA on AWS, ARO on Azure) match the team’s other clouds.

Datacenter locations#

Code

Location

us-south

Dallas, Texas, USA

us-east

Washington DC, USA

ca-tor

Toronto, Canada

ca-mon

Montreal, Canada

br-sao

São Paulo, Brazil

eu-de

Frankfurt, Germany

eu-gb

London, United Kingdom

eu-es

Madrid, Spain

eu-fr2

Paris, France

jp-tok

Tokyo, Japan

jp-osa

Osaka, Japan

au-syd

Sydney, Australia

References#

Contents