Welcome to Project Comet

The purpose of Project Comet was to develop a reusable technical asset to demonstrate how an insurance company can leverage the IBM Hybrid Cloud Portfolio in a heterogeneous and hybrid environment while also highlighting the architectural shifts from SOA to microservices.

Business Problem:

The point in time that a person (or entity) is requesting a quote for insurance the insurance company has some predictable questions that they are asking themselves:

1. Mutable, the rules I have in place today may not be the rules I want in place tomorrow, I need a flexible solution so I can rapidly deploy new rules quickly.
2. How do I reduce the time between a business decision of changing/adding/deleting a current rule to the point in time that is running in production? What would be the impact if you couldn’t?
3. Is there a severe weather event that is occurring or about to occur in that geographic location?

Our Solution:

To create a reusable industry specific demo for clients that contains multiple products in the Hybrid Cloud Portfolio: API Connect, ODM, Weather Services, Cloudant DB, IBM Cloud & DevOps. We wanted to put these products in their sweet spots! The solution architecture is both on-prem/off-prem. We created Cloud Foundry applications written in Node.js and have three running on IBM Cloud and one running in a Docker container.

Our solution highlights the architectural shifts from SOA to microservices to show that we understand both and how they can co-exist. Our goal was for this to accelerate IBM’s success in Cloud and to target developer communities.

Technical Skills Learned:

• Node.js
• Cloud Foundry
• Docker
• SOA & Microservices architectures
• IBM Cloud
• DevOps continuous toolchain: Eclipse IDE, Git, Deployment Visibility
• UrbanCode
• API Connect
• ODM
• TypeScript
• CloudantDB/JSON
• Debugging
• HTTP & REST APIs
• IBM Design Thinking

Business Value Added:

• API Connect
  • Flexibility of a microservices architecture
  • Independent development
  • Omni-channel
• ODM
  • Mutability
  • Centralized repository
• DevOps
  • Rapid development
  • Increased productivity

Future Plans:

• Cloud Private
• Watson
• Analytics
• Eventing