38 Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks on IBM Power Systems: Volume 1
3.1  Overview
This section introduces and describes IBM Cloud Paks.
3.1.1  What are IBM Cloud Paks?
IBM Cloud Paks are pre-integrated containers, pre-packaged solutions, that are ready for 
deployment in production environments. These IBM Cloud Paks can be easily deployed to 
Kubernetes-based container orchestration platforms. They are software solutions that give 
clients an open, faster, and more secure way than individual solutions to move core business 
applications to any cloud. 
Designed to reduce development time, IBM Cloud Paks include IBM middleware and common 
software services for development and management, on top of a standard integration layer. 
They are portable and can run on-premises, on public clouds, or in an integrated system. 
At the time of this writing, IBM offers six independent Cloud Paks for Power Systems that 
provides a Kubernetes environment to help to build cloud-native applications or modernize 
the existing applications. Also, IBM Cloud Paks enable you to quickly bring workloads to an 
integrated container platform to support production-level qualities of service and end-to-end 
lifecycle management. 
Figure 3-1 on page 39 shows the following evolution of containers:
/SM590000Ad hoc Containers: Clients obtain IBM software binaries then create their container.
/SM590000IBM Containers: Clients obtain an individual IBM container software product.
/SM590000IBM Cloud Paks: Clients obtain a ready-to-use solution.