Our industry is undergoing a major transformation as we move from traditional, server-based architectures to modern, more agile, and scalable technologies. A Dell survey on containerization shows that over 50 percent of applications at mid-to-large-sized enterprises are containerized, and 88 percent are deploying containerized third-party applications and services, or developing their own.

BMC Containerization Overview

BMC has embraced the Kubernetes platform and is reaping the benefits of container technology to deliver a modern platform that addresses the needs of a more complex and dynamic world. We have been running the BMC Helix software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for over three years using this modern architecture.

Our scalable, containerized architecture enables you to run our industry-leading IT service and operations management (ITSM/ITOM) solutions anywhere you choose; whether that’s on-premises, public or private cloud, or SaaS. It also offers new capabilities such as ServiceOps, artificial intelligence service management (AISM), BMC Helix Dashboards, BMC Helix Business Workflows, and the next-generation development platform, BMC Helix Innovation Studio, and supports modern ITOM, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), monitoring and observability, optimization, and intelligent automation.

As part of the industry’s transformation, the best practices for deploying and managing these sophisticated, powerful solutions are still evolving, and BMC is actively working to develop them in conjunction with industry peers, partners, and customers, particularly with regards to third-party vendor software.

Infrastructure Sizing Improvements

Most importantly, BMC is listening to our customers and partners about how we can best support the journey to containers, and we’ve received feedback that the infrastructure requirements for the BMC Helix containerized architecture are higher than expected.

Consequently, a dedicated team has spent the last three months working to optimize our software deployments and make it easier for customers to plan deployments for a wider range of use cases.

We’re delighted to share that this intensive focus and investment is now showing positive results in our testing environments. We expect customers will be able to deploy and run BMC Helix Service Management with significantly lower infrastructure requirements and costs than are currently recommended, while still enjoying the robust, stable, and highly available service that they expect.

A reduction of our infrastructure sizing recommendations is expected to be published shortly, and we expect to see further improvements across the rest of the portfolio as we continue to focus on performance engineering activities.

Our guidance will also be updated to enable customers to:

• Plan deployments on standalone or shared Kubernetes clusters
• Right-size for a wide variety of use cases
• Deploy optimized systems for non-production environments
• Gather accurate usage data from existing BMC IT service management deployments

To learn how we achieved significant reductions so quickly using BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to find over-allocation and optimization opportunities in our software running on Kubernetes, check out this blog post.

While we expect these improvements will exceed the expectations of our customers and partners, we don’t plan to stop there. BMC will continue to invest in improvements in this area and we plan to deliver ongoing performance improvements throughout 2023 to reduce your cost of ownership and improve the value of your investment in BMC solutions.

Kubernetes Overview

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, distributing the application based on the resource availability between different servers (Nodes) which form a Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes clusters are typically designed, and highly efficient, when configured to host multiple applications. To learn more about Kubernetes and containers, please see our introductory blog post on the subject.

BMC Containerized Software

BMC has made our industry-leading solutions available using the modern capabilities and architecture of the Kubernetes platform, including:

• BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps
• BMC Helix Continuous Optimization
• BMC Helix service management portfolio including BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Business Workflows, and BMC Helix Digital Workplace

BMC-Supported Kubernetes Platforms

BMC supports the deployment of our software on of the following Kubernetes platforms, solutions, and services:

• Kubernetes Platforms
  • Kubernetes
  • Red Hat OpenShift
• Kubernetes Management Solutions
  • VMWare Tanzu
  • Nutanix Karbon
  • Rancher Kubernetes
• Public Cloud Managed Kubernetes
  • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
  • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
  • Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE)

BMC software runs in the same way across any of these platforms, enabling customers to move freely between different platforms as their business needs and strategy evolve. Containerization also enables frictionless migration from customer-managed platforms to BMC Helix SaaS.

BMC Documentation

Refer to this BMC Helix Service Management on-premises planning documentation for details on how to plan for your BMC Helix on-premises deployment.

Thank you for your ongoing support for the program of innovation which BMC is delivering. Please do not hesitate to reach out through your BMC Account Manager or Customer Success representative if you have any queries or further feedback. We’re here to support you.

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization is used by our customers to achieve their service assurance and optimization goals. Powerful visualization, prediction, optimization, and automation capabilities enable organizations to realize significant cost–savings and guarantee stability across on-premises and multi-cloud IT estates. 

BMC also leverages these powerful features to optimize our own BMC Helix software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and on-premises software.

One of the mantras we repeat to our customers is, “Your optimization efforts are not a one-time thing. They’re continuous.” BMC’s SaaS operations teams continuously monitor and optimize the BMC Helix SaaS platform using BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to ensure we’re efficiently delivering stable, cost-efficient services to our customers who use our modern, scalable, containerized BMC Helix platform.  

As demand changes, BMC Helix Continuous Optimization automatically recommends and automates optimal configurations for memory, CPU, and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) settings, and horizontal pod autoscaling (HPA). Employing the solution internally also helps BMC ensure that we’re allocating the right resources, without over–provisioning, to guarantee a stable and highly performant service for our customers. The BMC Helix SaaS platform continually delivers 99.99 percent average availability across all regions spanning 30+ subscription services, exceeding our service level agreement (SLA) commitment. 

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization has also enabled us to significantly optimize the BMC software solutions that our customers deploy in their on-premises, public or private cloud context. As part of a recent project to improve the resource requirements of BMC Helix ITSM, we identified optimizations that will allow our customers to reduce their Kubernetes compute footprint by more than 20 percent—without making any changes to BMC code.  

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization provided visibility and actionable insights into the behavior of how BMC Helix Service Management application behaves under load at every level of the Kubernetes architecture. The intuitive user-interface allowed our engineers to explore optimization opportunities for CPU, memory, and storage across clusters, namespaces, nodes, and pods. 

Figure 1. A sample of dashboards showing Kubernetes container usage and suggestions for improved efficiency.

Actionable insights

Using BMC Helix Continuous Optimization enables full visibility into the resource usage and patterns to provide actionable right-sizing recommendations based on each customer’s historical and current resource utilization. We are also able to simulate future events such as:

• New user onboarding
• Business events that may increase or decrease resource utilization
• Deployment and data center change preparations

This allows us to allocate the required resources to support our customers’ mission-critical business services using BMC products on-premises. By modeling each service in our products leveraging the BMC Helix platform and the BMC Helix IT Operations Management suite—which includes BMC Helix Discovery integrated with BMC Helix Continuous Optimization—we are further able to correlate business drivers (mission-critical KPIs like “number of logins” or “number of users opening a support ticket”) with system metrics, enabling predictive service assurance, health, and optimization.

Benchmarking once is not enough

Typically, benchmarks are used for sizing applications and resources. These benchmarks are like t-shirt sizing: small, medium, and large. But do all t-shirts fit you the same way? No. When it comes to a perfect-fitting t-shirt, you need a tailored fit.

Benchmarks are set and hopefully revisited occasionally. In a digital world that’s driven by constant change, continuous optimization of resource allocation is a business imperative to staying competitive and maintaining service levels.

Continually optimizing is optimal

As you develop and deploy new services to support the popularity growth of your current offerings, you’ll need to continually assess whether you have the proper sizing for your environment. Too little, performance suffers. Too much, your bottom line suffers.

It’s tedious work to manually model, analyze, and calculate sizing or determining if migrating from on-premises to cloud or from one public cloud provider to another makes sense. More so when you must do it often.

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization takes care of the leg work for you:

• Gain visibility across the enterprise, including legacy applications and on-premises, physical, virtual, containerized, Kubernetes, pod, and cloud infrastructure resources.
• Understand the overall health of business services using comprehensive, consolidated views of application and infrastructure metrics to maximize performance and minimize cost. Predictive saturation forecasting helps you avoid failures and slowdowns.
• Deploy applications on time by reserving IT resources when needed.
• Receive actionable risk mitigation and cost savings recommendations for your containerized environments integrated with BMC Helix Intelligent Automation.
• Perform advanced what-if simulation analysis for your business services based on the critical KPIs (business drivers) impacting your business.
• Simulate and analyze cloud migrations and Kubernetes workload impact before implementation.

As we continually enhance our BMC Helix solutions (both SaaS and on-premises), BMC Helix Continuous Optimization plays an important role in development and deployment to ensure we deliver an efficient solution to our customers.