IBM has introduced a new development environment called Microclimate which is designed to simplify and speed up app creation and modernization in this complex cloud world. Microclimate provides an end-to-end framework that can help you at every stage of the development process – from creating that first line of code to deploying the application in the cloud to monitoring its performance.
Microclimate supports development of apps using a microservices architecture. It’s designed to provide a common but flexible development framework so that microservices can work together regardless of who created them. Microclimate extends and is integrated into IBM Cloud Private, a container-based platform that that enables you to design, develop, deploy and manage on-premises, containerized cloud applications behind your firewall. You can download community editions at no charge of Microclimate at this link and Cloud Private at this link.
Fast, flexible, intelligent app development
Microclimate supports multiple frameworks, runtimes (Java, Node, Swift), integrated development environments, toolchains and pipelines. Microclimate can also import existing services for developers who want to enhance or modernize existing projects. To tie together all these options and advance agile DevOps, Microclimate delivers these foundational capabilities:
- Containerized development: Uses lightweight Docker containers orchestrated by Kubernetes to make it easy to build and move apps between any environment. The same environment can be downloaded locally on a laptop or run on the cloud.
- Rapid iteration: Delivers fast round-tripping through edit, build, and run to enable real-time performance insights, regardless of what development phase you’re in.
- Intelligent feedback: Enables you to incorporate best practices and immediate feedback to help improve an application through the IDE of your choice.
- Diagnostic services: Adds capabilities at development time to improve problem determination in production through application metrics.
- Integrated Devops pipeline: Provides a preconfigured DevOps pipeline that can be tailored to the needs of developers to help get apps to production faster.
“Our goal in creating Microclimate was to streamline the development process, so you can spend more time writing code and less time trying to cobble together all the services you need to create great apps,” said Andy Hoyt, Vice President of the Developer Experience for IBM Hybrid Cloud. “Since the development environment is containerized, you can easily share versions with colleagues to get their feedback, and when you’re ready to deploy, simply move the application from your development environment – whether on your laptop or the cloud – to the cloud of your choice.”
Watch this Microclimate overview video to learn more.
