vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
: 8 September: SES Networks is now available with Diversity in WDC02 for Connect.
: 8 September: BT is now available without Diversity in Sao Paulo for Connect.
: 8 September: Centurylink is now available without Diversity in Miami for Connect.

IBM Cloud Direct Link continues connectivity collaborations
: The IBM Cloud Direct Link service continues to expand globally! In light of the recent IBM Cloud Service Provider Program announcement, we made several more announcements recently.





 01 August 2018 

CenturyLink Connects to IBM
: CenturyLink Cloud Connect Solutions now deliver private, secure network connectivity to IBM Cloud, helping organizations innovate more efficiently by establishing low-latency connections on a global basis across a private network to the IBM Cloud through IBM Cloud Direct Link. This extended collaboration between Century Link and IBM builds on Century Link's existing support for IBM Business Resiliency Services and IBM Cloud Managed Services.





 01 July 2018 

Digital Realty adds direct, secure access to IBM Cloud in 15 global metros
: Direct access to IBM Cloud is now available through the Digital Realty Service Exchange and IBM Cloud Direct, by using more than 70 Digital Realty data centers and multiple continents around the globe. The Digital Realty Service Exchange provides private, secure, high-throughput, and low-latency access over a single interface to IBM Cloud, helping customers overcome some of the limitations of the public internet and helping to eliminate network congestion and enable critical workloads that were not previously feasible, such as AI, machine learning, and blockchain.





 01 June 2018 

IBM Cloud Direct Link Service Provider Program
: We're pleased to announce our new IBM Cloud Direct Link Service Provider Program, which enables enterprises to select from a robust ecosystem of local and global providers and create the private connections to IBM Cloud that best suit their needs. We work closely to provide technical enablement and training to help ensure that service providers can offer enterprises reliable connectivity to the cloud from anywhere in the world. This gives our joint customers greater choice to select the right provider, speed of service, location, and deployment model to create a secure, highly available hybrid connection.

Colt offers direct access to IBM Cloud Direct Link
: IBM Cloud is pleased to announce our extended collaboration with Colt.
: VMware changed the vRealize Operations Tenant App for VMware Cloud Director product name to VMware Chargeback. The name is updated throughout the VMware Shared documentation.

Bring Your Own License (BYOL) no longer supported
: IBM Cloud previously allowed you to bring your own license (BYOL) when you move your existing on-premises VMware workloads to IBM Cloud. BYOL is no longer allowed by VMware. You can no longer bring your own licenses for any new hosts. This restriction applies to all VMware products that are available from IBM Cloud. For existing BYOL servers, you can still upgrade and migrate to refresh software and hardware.

SAP-certified servers updates
: SAP HANA certified bare metal servers now offer only fixed configurations with defined RAM sizes. Also, new SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver models are available for deployment with VMware vSphere 7.0u3. These models are available for VMware vCenter Server and Cyber Recovery instances and clusters, and for VMware vSphere clusters. For more information, see SAP-certified.

NetBIOS domain name
: The first qualifier of the root domain name is now the NetBIOS name by default. It is part of the network diagram when your order vCenter Server and Cyber Recovery instances.

Add-on services upgrades
: The following service versions are now available to install on deployed instances.



* FortiGate Virtual Appliance 7.2.2
* Juniper vSRX v21.4 (R2)



Veeam migration from NSX-V to NSX-T
: To migrate the Veeam service from VMware NSX-V to VMware NSX-T, open an IBM Support ticket by following the steps in Contacting IBM Support.

REST API
: For VMware Shared, the V1 API support ended on 31 December 2022. Use the [V2 API](https://cloud.ibm.com/apidocs/vmware-solutions-shared/vmware-solutions-shared-v2.0.0).

User interface updates and enhancements
You agree that IBM Cloud's entire liability to You under this Agreement, and Your only remedy, in connection with any service provided by IBM Cloud to You under this Agreement, and for any breach of this Agreement by IBM Cloud, shall be limited to the fees You paid to IBM Cloud for the particular service in contention. IBM Cloud and its agents and contractors shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages resulting from the use of or inability to use any of IBM Cloud's services or for the cost of obtaining substitute services. Because certain states do not permit the limitation of elimination of liability for certain types of damage, IBM Cloud’s liability shall be limited as much as permitted by applicable law. IBM Cloud disclaims any loss or liability resulting from:



* access delays or interruptions to our web site or domain name registration system
* data non-delivery or mis-delivery between You and IBM Cloud
* events beyond our control (i.e. acts of God)
* the loss of registration or processing of a domain name or the use of a domain name
* the failure for whatever reason to renew a domain name registration
* the unauthorized use of Your account with IBM Cloud or any of services provided to You by IBM Cloud
* errors, omissions or misstatements
* deletion of, failure to store, or failure to process or act upon email messages
* processing of updated information to Your registration record
* development or interruption of Your web site
* errors taking place with regard to the processing of Your application
* application of IBM Cloud 's Dispute Resolution Policy
* any act or omission caused by You or Your agent (whether authorized by You or not)







 Indemnity 

You agree to release, defend, indemnify and hold harmless IBM Cloud and its contractors, agents, employees, officers, directors, shareholders and affiliates from and against any losses, damages or costs, including reasonable attorney's fees, resulting from any claim, action, proceeding suit or demand arising out of or related to Your (including Your agents, affiliates or anyone using Your account with IBM Cloud whether or not on Your behalf, and whether or not with Your permission) use of the services provided by IBM Cloud.
The IBM Cloud for Financial Services Validated designation is available for services that are operating in the Dallas (us-south), Washington DC (us-east), Frankfurt (eu-de), and London (eu-gb)

multizone regions.

Use Activity Tracker Event Routing to manage auditing events in your account while maintaining Financial Services Validated status.





 PCI, SOC2, Privacy Shield and HIPAA compliance 

Activity Tracker offers ready to run event search offerings that you can use to expedite your time to greater insights. You can choose to retain your events for 7, 14, or 30 days. In addition, a 30 day HIPAA compliant offering is also available. For more information on these offerings, see [Service plans](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/activity-tracker?topic=activity-tracker-service_plan).

Use Activity Tracker hosted event search offering to manage events through the UI or to manage auditing events that are not routed by Activity Tracker Event Routing.





 Features 

IBM Cloud Activity Tracker provides the follow features:



* Simplify compliance sign-off tasks

Boost audit tasks on your IBM Cloud account by automatically collecting events that report on actions to resources in your account. Analyze and get notified on the events that report out of compliance actions.
* Accelerate detection of security incidents

Get alert notifications of important events and errors when things are out of compliance. Create custom views and get notified immediately. You can configure multi-channel alert notifications based on pattern matching to a variety of direct integrations such as email, Slack, PagerDuty, or your own custom webhooks.
* Improve visibility on actions in your IBM Cloud account

Improve the visibility into user and resource activity in your account by easily identifying the initiator who requested an action, the object on which the action was requested, and the time when the action took place.
* Adhere to standards

Events comply with the Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) standard. Use simple to use keyword-based search to search across your events instead of using custom query languages. Apply the same keyword search to instantly build time series graphs.



Zoom

!
The [VMware Aria Operations on IBM Cloud](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/vmwaresolutions?topic=vmwaresolutions-vrops_overview) offering can help you operate and monitor the performance, health, and capacity of your VMware environment.
* Monitoring your backup infrastructure and backup jobs.
* vSphere Distributed Switch Health Check is enabled by default. It can generate a significant number of MAC addresses for testing team policy, MTU size, and VLAN configuration, which results in extra network traffic. Disable this health check and re-enable only as needed for network troubleshooting. For more information, see [vSphere Distributed Switch Health Check](https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.networking.doc/GUID-4A6C1E1C-8577-4AE6-8459-EEB942779A82.html).







 Business continuity and availability 

Considering your VMware instance is running on IBM Cloud bare metal server, complete the following steps to ensure that you make adequate plans for high availability and business continuity:



* Review vSphere HA and vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) configuration against your requirements.
* Review network and storage I/O control configuration against your requirements.
* Configure the virtual machine startup order against your requirements.
* Configure resource pools, as needed, for management and workload.
* Plan, implement, and monitor a backup solution for both management components and workload.
* Plan for high availability of instance management, including the possibility of multiple instances, multiple clusters, and vCenter HA.
* Use backup solutions such as Veeam to plan for business continuity for your workloads.







 Storage planning 

In addition to capacity planning, complete the following to ensure that your storage configuration meets your performance and availability requirements:



* Storage performance depends on various factors. This action includes RAID configuration and disk striping, network configuration, block size, IOPS configuration (input/output operations per second) for network-attached storage.
[The Truck Tracker Solution](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/ec83e0c9f915f4acf715222aaa5b8387c028200c/databases-for-mongodb/includes/cloud-databases/includes/cloud-databases/images/TruckTrackerOS.png)

Figure 1. The Truck Tracker Solution

In a real-life scenario, your data generators (the truck's IoT devices) would have to find a way to communicate with the Event Streams application, probably using the MQTT protocol. We will simulate our trucks traveling around the country and sending data by using a script (producer.js) that will be generating a truck location every second by reading from a predefined set of lat/long pairs of a couple of "road trips" (LAToDallas.json and boulderToNYC.json) and feeding it into Event Streams.

This tutorial should take you about an hour to complete. It will not be cost-free because some of the IBM services we will use do not come with a free tier, but if you deprovision the services after completing it, you should not have to pay more than a few dollars.





 What you will need 

Before you begin, it's a good idea to install some necessary productivity tools:



* An [IBM Cloud](https://cloud.ibm.com/login) pay-as-you-go account (make sure it is [logged in to your account.](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cli?topic=cli-getting-startedstep4-configure-idt-env))
* The [IBM CLI](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cli) - the command line interface to interact with the IBM API. You will need to make sure it has the following [plug-ins](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cli?topic=cli-plug-ins):



* openshift (oc)
* container registry (cr)
[The Truck Tracker Solution](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/c1b02d6157702384a9668d8c58bb951e69117793/databases-for-redis/includes/cloud-databases/includes/cloud-databases/images/TruckTrackerOS.png)

Figure 1. The Truck Tracker Solution

In a real-life scenario, your data generators (the truck's IoT devices) would have to find a way to communicate with the Event Streams application, probably using the MQTT protocol. We will simulate our trucks traveling around the country and sending data by using a script (producer.js) that will be generating a truck location every second by reading from a predefined set of lat/long pairs of a couple of "road trips" (LAToDallas.json and boulderToNYC.json) and feeding it into Event Streams.

This tutorial should take you about an hour to complete. It will not be cost-free because some of the IBM services we will use do not come with a free tier, but if you deprovision the services after completing it, you should not have to pay more than a few dollars.





 What you will need 

Before you begin, it's a good idea to install some necessary productivity tools:



* An [IBM Cloud](https://cloud.ibm.com/login) pay-as-you-go account (make sure it is [logged in to your account.](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cli?topic=cli-getting-startedstep4-configure-idt-env))
* The [IBM CLI](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cli) - the command line interface to interact with the IBM API. You will need to make sure it has the following [plug-ins](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/cli?topic=cli-plug-ins):



* openshift (oc)
* container registry (cr)
: Version 1.3.0 of the IBM Cloud for Financial Services profile is now available. For more information, see the [Change log](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/security-compliance?topic=security-compliance-fs-change-log).

IBM Cloud Security Best Practices profile version 1.2.0
: Updates to version 1.2.0 of the IBM Cloud Security Best Practices library and profile are now available. For more information, see the [Change log](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/security-compliance?topic=security-compliance-ibm-sec-best-practices-change-log).





 7 June 2023 

OpenShift Compliance Operator (OSCO)
: You can now evaluate your OpenShift clusters by using the OSCO integration in the updated architecture. For help getting started or customizing your workflow, see [Evaluate the compliance of your RedHat OpenShift Clusters](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/security-compliance?topic=security-compliance-osco-scan).





 29 May 2023 

Reminder: Security and Compliance Center will become regional
: Starting 8 July 2023 Security and Compliance Center will be a provisionable, regional service offering in the IBM Cloud catalog. With this change, you will have full control over the region that is used when Security and Compliance Center processes your data. To process data in different regions, you can create multiple instances of the service in a single account.

deprecated

To support this change, support for the collector-based architecture was deprecated. This means that all of the configurations surrounding collectors, goal-based profiles, collector-based scans, goal-based results, and credentials will be removed at the end of support on 1 July 2023.

Additionally, the following changes will be made:



* Any Identity and Access Management (IAM) access policies or context-based restrictions that are scoped to “All Account Management Services” will no longer apply to Security and Compliance Center. Users who have access to “All Identity and Access Enabled Services” will now have access to Security and Compliance Center.
Integrated with the IBM Cloud platform for on-demand provisioning, this offering provides a secure and scalable server virtualization environment that is built upon the advanced RAS features and leading performance of the Power Systems™ platform. See [IBM® Power® Systems Virtual Server](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/power-iaas?topic=power-iaas-getting-started).

The following table lists Power IaaS infrastructure services that send auditing events:



Table 18. List of Power Systems Virtual Server infrastructure services

 Service Service name Activity Tracker hosted event search offering Events 

 [Images](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/power-iaas?topic=power-iaas-deploy-custom-image) power-iaas ![Checkmark](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/6f3c07c34058f637b1c86044ca4f9b24214330a7/activity-tracker//images/checkmark-icon.svg) [Location-based events](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/power-iaas?topic=power-iaas-at-eventsat-actions-images) 
 [Networks](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/power-iaas?topic=power-iaas-connecting-networks) power-iaas ![Checkmark](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/6f3c07c34058f637b1c86044ca4f9b24214330a7/activity-tracker//images/checkmark-icon.svg) [Location-based events](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/power-iaas?topic=power-iaas-at-eventsat-actions-networks) 
 [PVM-Instance](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/power-iaas?topic=power-iaas-creating-power-virtual-server) power-iaas !
For all other VMware component updates, you must ensure that newly deployed ESXi servers and clusters have the most recent updates that you require. IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions does not offer support for applying updates and patches for VMware components. You must monitor and apply these updates yourself.

To download ESXi updates from VMware, you can configure VMware Update Manager (VUM), which is integrated into your vCenter Server. For more information, see [VMware Support](https://www.vmware.com/support.html).





 Does the management services NSX Edge pose a security risk? 

Although the VMware NSX Edge™ for management services is on a public subnet, the following security measures are in place to ensure that it does not pose a security risk:



* The NSX Edge firewall is configured to allow only outgoing HTTPS (TCP port 443) traffic that is initiated by the management virtual machines.
* SNAT (Source Network Address Translation) is used so that private IP addresses are not visible outside the private network.
* Remote access for the management services NSX Edge appliance is disabled.
* Passwords for accessing the management services NSX Edge from the private network are randomized and encrypted.







 Does the customer-managed NSX Edge pose a security risk? 

Although the customer-managed NSX Edge is connected to the public VLAN, security measures are in place to ensure that it does not pose a security risk. The following security measures are in place:



* A firewall rule is in place to allow only outgoing traffic from the private subnet range of IP addresses.
* A SNAT rule (disabled by default) is in place to convert all IP addresses from the private subnet to a single IP address on the public subnet.
* Remote access for the customer-managed NSX Edge appliance is disabled.
* Passwords for accessing the customer-managed NSX Edge from the private network are randomized and encrypted.







 How do I choose the data centers for my instances? 

The instance deployments have strict physical infrastructure requirements, which vary among IBM Cloud data centers.
[Documentation](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-paks/cp-integration) For more information such as postinstallation tasks and pricing. 









 Cloud Pak for Security 



Cloud Pak for Security

 Area Description 

 Use cases <br><br> * Synchronize teamwork and playbooks to enhance security incident response.<br> * Increase threat hunting speed with a smart query builder, intelligent threat prioritization, and federated search.<br> * Real-time data security controls and audit visibility across hybrid cloud environments.<br><br><br> 
 [Catalog entry](https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog?search=label%3Acloud_paksoftware) For included components, required cluster size, and installation. 
 [Documentation](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-paks/cp-security) For more information such as postinstallation tasks and pricing. 







 Cloud Pak for Management 



Cloud Pak for Management

 Area Description 

 Use cases <br><br> * Consistently and securely manage your apps that are deployed in Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift clusters across multiple cloud providers.<br> * Consolidate event monitoring information across clusters in off-prem and on-prem clouds.<br> * Optimize workflows with automatic provisioning of virtual machines and other infrastructure resources across clouds providers.<br><br><br> 
 [Catalog entry](https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog?search=label%3Acloud_pak) For included components, required cluster size, and installation. 
 [Documentation](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-paks/cp-management) For more information such as postinstallation tasks and pricing. 







 Adding IBM Cloud Paks 

[IBM Cloud Paks](https://www.ibm.com/cloud-paks/) are containerized, licensed IBM middleware and open source software components as part of your hybrid cloud solution. IBM Cloud Paks run exclusively on Red Hat OpenShift clusters, not community Kubernetes clusters.

Before you begin:
Go into the root of the project and type the following:

./build.sh





 Step 5: Watch your trucks truckin' 

The end of the script will output a URL — something like https:// some.thing.eu-gb.appdomain.cloud.

If you visit the URL that has been generated, you should be able to see a map of the US and, after a few seconds, several markers on the map that represent your trucks:

Zoom

![The Truck Tracker Wide View](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/5561b38c6df9e8168523d143eaf64ab6acd7b600/cloud-databases/images/trucktrackerwide.png)

Figure 3. All-Truck View

If you zoom in on one of these markers you will see it moving along the road. As the fleet manager, you now know where all your trucks are.

Zoom

![The Truck Tracker Zoom View](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/5561b38c6df9e8168523d143eaf64ab6acd7b600/cloud-databases/images/trucktrackerzoom.png)

Figure 4. Single-Truck View







 What you just did 



 The build.sh script 

The build.sh script does a number of things:



1. It builds a docker image for each of the services you need. The producer, consumers and web application are all in different folders. Each folder has its own simple Dockerfile file that is used by the script to create a container image, which is then uploaded to the IBM Container Registry.
2. It creates a bunch of kubernetes secrets with all the credentials that are going to be needed to access the different IBM services (IBM Cloudant, Redis and Event Streams).
3. It deploys the application code (and the secretes) to the Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud cluster using the instructions contained in the deployment.yml script.