IBM adds self-hosted deployment for Bob development platform

IBM has introduced a self-hosted deployment option for its Bob agentic software-development platform, allowing enterprises to run the product on customer-managed infrastructure. IBM said the option is generally available for on-premises, private-cloud, sovereign-cloud and air-gapped environments.

The new option gives organizations another way to use Bob when source code, application context and data must remain inside controlled infrastructure. IBM says it is intended for organizations with security, compliance, data-sovereignty and governance requirements, including financial-services, government, healthcare and critical-infrastructure operators. The claimed security, compliance and sovereignty benefits have not been independently validated in the available source material.

IBM describes Bob as an AI platform for software delivery and modernization, not solely a code-generation tool. With a supported self-hosted model configuration, IBM says code, development context and build artifacts can remain inside the customer-managed environment. Customers can also connect Bob to supported external model services in a hybrid configuration and use eligible model licenses under a bring-your-own-license approach.

The self-hosted architecture runs on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Customers manage the backend infrastructure, services and integrations, while developers retain the Bob IDE extensions and BobShell workflow available in the software-as-a-service version. IBM’s documentation says a dedicated OpenShift cluster is unnecessary if a shared cluster has sufficient compute, memory and storage.

For disconnected environments, IBM documents direct- and indirect-mirroring installation methods that copy product images into an internal registry. In both air-gapped configurations, model inference runs on premises, updates arrive through offline bundles and telemetry is disabled.

Self-hosting also moves operational work to the customer. IBM’s documentation says customers are responsible for lifecycle operations and for configuring networking, storage and identity. Security-event logging and monitoring run at the OpenShift platform level rather than within Bob, leaving customers to operate and retain those logs under their own security, audit and compliance requirements.