Preface
Cloud Pak for Data is IBM's modern Data and AI platform that includes strategic offerings from its data and AI portfolio delivered in a cloud-native fashion with the flexibility of deployment on any cloud. The platform offers a unique approach to address modern challenges with an integrated mix of proprietary, open source, and third-party services.
You will start with key concepts in modern data management and AI, review real-life use cases, and develop an appreciation of the AI Ladder principle. With this foundation, you will explore how Cloud Pak for Data helps in the elegant implementation of the AI Ladder practice to collect, organize, analyze, and infuse data and trustworthy AI across your business. As you advance, you will also discover the capabilities of the platform and extension services, including how they are packaged and priced. With examples throughout the book, you will gain a deep understanding of the platform, from its rich capabilities and technical architecture to its ecosystem and key go-to-market aspects.
At the end of this IBM book, you will be well-versed in the concepts of IBM Cloud Pak for Data, and be able to apply its prescriptive practices and leverage its capabilities in building a trusted data foundation and accelerate AI adoption in your enterprise.
Note
The content in this book is comprehensive and covers multiple versions in support as of Oct 2021 including version 3.5 and version 4.0. Some of the services, capabilities, and features highlighted in the book might not be relevant to all versions, and as the product evolves we expect a few more changes.
However, the overarching message, value prop, and underlying architecture will remain more or less consistent. Given the rapid progress and product evolution, we decided to be exhaustive while focusing to highlight the core concepts.
We sincerely hope that you will find this book helpful and overlook any inconsistencies attributed to product evolution.
Who this book is for
This book is for business executives, CIOs, CDOs, data scientists, data stewards, data engineers, and developers interested in learning about IBM's Cloud Pak for Data. Knowledge of technical concepts and familiarity with data, analytics, and AI initiatives at various levels of maturity is required to make the most of this book.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, The AI Ladder: IBM's Prescriptive Approach, explores market dynamics, IBM's data and AI portfolio, and a detailed overview of the AI Ladder, what it entails, and how IBM offerings map to the different rungs of the ladder.
Chapter 2, Cloud Pak for Data: A Brief Introduction, covers IBM's modern data and AI platform in detail, along with some of its key differentiators. We will discuss Red Hat OpenShift, the implied cloud benefits it confers, and the platform foundational services that form the basis of Cloud Pak for Data.
Chapter 3, Collect – Making Data Simple and Accessible, offers a flexible approach to address the modern challenges with data-centric delivery, with the proliferation of data both in terms of volume and variety, with a mix of proprietary, open source, and third-party services.
Chapter 4, Organize – Creating a Trusted Analytics Foundation, allows you to learn how Cloud Pak for Data enables Data Ops (data operations), orchestration of people, processes, and technology to deliver trusted, business-ready data to data citizens, operations, applications, and artificial intelligence (AI) fast.
Chapter 5, Analyzing: Building, Deploying, and Scaling Models with Trust and Transparency, explains how to analyze your data in smarter ways and benefit from visualization and AI models that empower your organization to gain new insights and make better and smarter decisions.
Chapter 6, Multi-Cloud Strategy and Cloud Satellite, offers to operationalize AI throughout the business, allowing your employees to focus on higher-value work.
Chapter 7, IBM and Partner Extension Services, covers the technical concepts underpinning Cloud Pak for Data, including, but not limited to, an architecture overview, common services, Day-2 operations, infrastructure and storage support, and other advanced concepts.
Chapter 8, Customer Use Cases, drills down into the concepts of extension services, how they are packaged and priced, and the various IBM extension services available on Cloud Pak for Data across the Collect, Organize, Analyze, and Infuse rungs of the AI ladder.
Chapter 9, Technical Overview, Management, and Administration, addresses the importance of a partner ecosystem, the different tiers of business partners, and how clients can benefit from an open ecosystem on Cloud Pak for Data.
Chapter 10, Security and Compliance, focuses on the importance of business outcomes and key customer use case patterns of Cloud Pak for Data while highlighting the top three use case patterns: data modernization, DataOps, and an automated AI life cycle.
Chapter 11, Storage, looks at how the two critical prerequisites for enterprise adoption, security and governance, are addressed in Cloud Pak for Data.
Chapter 12, Multi-Tenancy, covers the different storage options supported by Cloud Pak for Data and how to configure it for high availability and disaster recovery.
To get the most out of this book
Knowledge of technical concepts and familiarity with data, analytics, and AI initiatives at various levels of maturity is required to make the most of this book.
If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself. Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.
Download the color images
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here:
https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781800562127_ColorImages.pdf
Conventions used
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "The Cloud Pak for Data control plane introduces a special persistent volume claim called user-home-pvc."
A block of code is set as follows:
kubectl get pvc user-home-pvc
NAME STATUS VOLUME CAPACITY ACCESS MODES STORAGECLASS AGE
user-home-pvc Bound pvc-44e5a492-9921-41e1-bc42-b96a9a4dd3dc 10Gi RWX nfs-client 33d
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
Port: zencoreapi-tls 4444/TCP
TargetPort: 4444/TCP
Endpoints: 10.254.16.52:4444,10.254.20.23:4444
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "There are essentially two types of host nodes (as presented in the screenshot) – the Master and Compute (worker) nodes."
Tips or important notes
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