AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Maximizing Cloud Value with Generative AI on AWS using IBM Cloud Accelerators
By Phani Kumar Lingamallu, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Franklin Koilpillai, Cloud Solution Architect -IBM
By Hicks Lin, Distinguished Engineer – IBM
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Customers are facing challenges in maximizing the benefits of the cloud. While the cloud adoption rate is increasing, some customers have migrated to the cloud and cannot realize the benefits. According to a study conducted by HFS Research in partnership with IBM Consulting®, only 25% of surveyed enterprises have reported solid return on investment(ROI) on business outcomes from their cloud transformation efforts.
Today’s customer’s concern on cloud transformation can be categorized as follows:
- High one-time migration & modernization cost: The initial cost of migration can offset the benefits of cloud adoption, delaying ROI realization.
- Lack of insights while migrating critical workloads to cloud: Complexities such as lack of documentation, technical debt, and regulations make it difficult for customers to predict risks and migrate to the cloud.
- Absence of speed and business agility: Customers struggle to build cloud-native applications due to the steep learning curve and extensive testing required, hindering their ability to scale innovation and realize value quickly.
As an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with numerous AWS Competencies and Service Delivery specializations, including Migration Consulting competency and Generative AI Services competency, IBM holds a distinguished position in the industry. With IBM Consulting’s extensive expertise and depth of capabilities in Cloud adoption gained through thousands of client transformation, businesses trust in IBM’s proven track record of success.
This blog explains how IBM Consulting is working closely with AWS and leveraging their Generative AI tools like Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q to help customers maximize the cloud value in addressing these challenges through IBM Consulting Cloud accelerator.
How IBM help customers to realize cloud value in AWS?
We took the customer challenges as our objectives and worked together with AWS to build solutions using AWS generative AI services. The AI solutions are grouped and organized by the objectives and outcomes as shown below.
Figure 1: IBM Generative AI solution grouped by objectives.
IBM and AWS joint approach is focused on helping customers to maximize the cloud value, reduce the cloud barriers that impede the cloud adoption and increase the ROI.
How we reduce one time migration cost?
1. Cognitive Discovery & Assessment:
IBM Consulting Delivery Curator (ICDC) which is part of the IBM consulting Cloud Accelerator is an IBM asset that uses Generative AI powered discovery as a service to power your cloud transformation project. It uses generative AI to automate data collection to reduce human touchpoints. ICDC accelerates the discovery and assessment process of migration by analysing existing documents to discover workloads, application characteristics, and dependencies. It’s AI capabilities, built on Amazon Bedrock models, reduce the need for repeated discovery and assessment during cloud transformation.
By leveraging collected data, ICDC enables simultaneous transition and migration, reducing costs and increasing speed by 50%. This approach streamlines the cloud transformation process, making it more efficient and effective.
2. AI Assisted Data Center Exit:
As organizations move to the cloud, they’re consolidating data centres and optimizing workloads. IBM helps customers exit data centre’s by grouping workloads into related application groups, then classifying them into “journeys” for accelerated and automated migration.
IBM Code Transporter is an IBM solution, infused with Amazon Bedrock Generative AI, automates code conversion, generation, and upgrades, reducing developer effort by 40%. It takes GitHub repository links as input, converting them to desired formats, and rapidly powers the migration process, increasing velocity.
IBM’s Gen AI powered Migration Chatbot helps in seamless communication & collaboration among stakeholders during the entire data center exit.
3. Modernizing Data:
An application modernization to cloud is always combined with the modernization of Data. Customers are looking at modernizing their databases to open source and cloud native to increase the business agility and reducing the cost of license. AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) provides a set of tools to discover, assess, convert the schema to target DB format and migrate the data. The traditional ways of migrating to cloud native Database engines involve rule-based conversion logic to change the schema, data, stored procedures, triggers, and functions to target format.
IBM has developed a generative AI based approach which increases the accuracy and speed of this database conversion and migration by 20% using the pre-trained AWS models which accelerate the conversion of stored procedures, triggers and functions from the source DB engine format to target DB engine format.
How is IBM helping customers to reduce the risks?
4. Optimize Technical Debt:
Migration to cloud offers a chance to reassess technical debt in applications. To maximize cloud value, organizations must reduce technical debt and leverage fully managed AWS services. Unsupported and end-of-life software leads to unmanageable code and security risks. Modernizing workloads to fully managed AWS services reduce the burden of updates and patches. IBM Consulting Delivery Curator (ICDC) helps identify end-of-life workloads and provides guidance for migration during the discovery process. AI-based queries powered by Amazon Bedrock runs on the knowledge output of the technical debt details collected by ICDC to provide insights on applications and database that are in end-of-life technology such as Windows 2008, SQL 2012, Java 8 and provides prescriptive migration path to upgrade them to higher version.
5. Intelligent Platform for IT Operations:
IBM Consulting AIOps on AWS (previously called IBM Consulting Platform Services on AWS (ICPSA)) is an intelligent platform for IT operations, observability, and application performance management. It uses AWS native services and generative AI capabilities leveraging Amazon Bedrock to provide better insights and intelligence. This solution helps operations teams make informed decisions by summarizing root causes, recommending remedial steps, generating runbooks, and creating automated scripts for remediation.
By using this solution, root cause analysis time is reduced by 20%-40%, and system uptime and availability are improved. It fills the gap between data capture and analysis, providing a targeted approach to derive meaningful insights.
6. Digital Assistants:
IBM Consulting assistants are part of the IBM Consulting Advantage platform that are purpose-built models that help solve business challenges. The models are packaged with pre-engineered prompts and output formats which can augment developers, testers, and architects during the development life cycle. IBM consultants working with the clients get tailored outputs to the queries, such as creating a detailed user persona-based test cases, test data, or a code for a specific language and function.
Early adopter teams using IBM Consulting advantage saw productivity improvements of up to 50% based on outcomes defined in IBM-AWS client engagement. The results may vary across clients during application design, development and testing pilot.
One of the challenges in the generative AI usage is to ensure it follows the AI ethics and ensure the output is fully compliant with enterprise standards of both regulated and non-regulated industries. IBM consulting assistants comes with guardrails that flag sensitive data to enable safe, trusted and unbiased results.
Improve Speed & Agility
7. Faster Application Development:
Traditional development processes can be slow, but generative AI can help speed up application development. IBM Consulting uses Digital Microservices Builder, powered by Amazon Bedrock helps you to accelerate application development, migration, and modernization. Example use cases include code generation in Python, Quarkus, Springboot, node.js with a robust CI/CD pipeline. This approach boosts productivity, reduces costs, offers significant cost saving and accelerates time-to-market by 11 percentage.
8. Automated IAC & DevOps Pipeline:
Generative AI enhances platform engineering and DevOps by automating key development processes. It enables seamless collaboration between development and operations teams using tools like Terraform and Ansible which helps in automating configuration files creation, and streamlining DevOps pipelines. Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q for developer can generate or accelerate source code development for infrastructure automation.
IBM Consulting developer experience platform is a generative AI based platform engineering control plane, which is a collection of accelerators that help to quickly provision and manage client environment which brings the choice of combining IBM assets and AWS services in a single stack and provides consistent, repeatable, and standardized approach towards infrastructure provisioning. The generative AI based automation leads to more efficient, scalable, and reliable solutions, ultimately driving the successful delivery of high-quality software for clients.
9. Accelerated Testing
IBM Ignite Quality Platform and Auto Augmented Quality Engineering (AAQE) powered by generative AI tools helps in automating test case generation and test data with Amazon Bedrock. This approach provides 100% test coverage, reduces testing cost by 20%-30% and improves software quality by identifying defects early.
There are several benefits for testing enabled by generative AI:
- Quality Improvement: Overall, using generative AI based testing improves the quality of software by more easily identifying defects, vulnerabilities, and performance issues early in the development lifecycle.
- Time and Cost Savings: Using generative AI to accelerate the testing in different phases, it not just saves time but also reduce costs associated with manual testing efforts.
- Coverage and Comprehensiveness: Due to the overall increase of testing productivity, the IT organizations can achieve broader test coverage by exploring different paths, inputs, and states while minimizing redundancy, ensuring comprehensive testing.
Figure 2: Provide higher ROI to clients by combining the power of AWS AI in IBM Assets
Business Benefits of IBM and AWS Generative AI Approach
Here is the summary of the key business benefits by utilizing the IBM and AWS generative AI services in cloud transformation:
- Simplification: Generative AI simplifies cloud transformation by addressing application migration and development challenges.
- Zero cost VMWare Migration to AWS: Combining the power of AI and our partnership with AWS, we have created a zero cost migration offer to move VMware workloads to AWS services rapidly and risk free.
- Risk Reduction: It helps classify issues, generate code, and automate context-sensitive tasks, reducing technical debt and risks.
- Legacy Code Enhancement: Developers can translate or refresh code using Generative AI, even for poorly documented legacy systems Ex: Upgrading Java 8, EJB 2.0 to latest.
- Skills Gap Bridging: Generative AI ensures consistent code quality across different developer skill levels, bridging the skills gap between traditional skills and modern technologies.
- Cost Reduction: By leveraging Generative AI for code conversion, generation, and reverse engineering, you can address common development challenges and reduce costs.
- Speed and Agility: Generative AI accelerates the development life cycle, enabling faster innovation and decision-making.
Conclusion
In this post, you discovered about the joint solutions developed by IBM and AWS on accelerating the migration by leveraging generative AI. With the generative AI accelerators, you can reduce one time migration cost and at the same time reduce operational risks and improve your developer productivity to unlock the full potential of the cloud and increase the ROI.
Contact IBM Consulting to learn more about how you can accelerate cloud transformation faster, cheaper and augment your transformation journey by ingesting generative AI skills/tools. We can help you identify and validate the generative AI PoCs. You can also explore our generative AI solutions in the AWS marketplace such as Design Assistant, Migration Chatbot, Discovery as a service.
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IBM – AWS Partner Spotlight
IBM is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with numerous AWS Competencies and Service Delivery specializations, including Migration Consulting competency and Generative AI Services competency, IBM holds a distinguished position in the industry. With IBM Consulting’s extensive expertise and depth of capabilities in Cloud adoption gained through thousands of client transformation, businesses trust in IBM’s proven track record of success.
Engage with IBM Consulting for a proof of concept (PoC) or demo.