IBM Bluemix is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering from IBM, based on the Cloud Foundry open source technology. In this post, I will talk about the top five things you should know before delving into the wonderful world of Bluemix.
Bluemix offers a one stop shop for agile development. It is a developer's heaven. Here is why?
Bluemix is a PaaS stack that offers developers to rapidly build, deploy and manage their applications. You can pick and choose from a variety of tools and services from IBM and partners in order to create a customized experience for your development needs. This includes APIs for many third-party and community developed services.
For example, you can start by creating a project in Bluemix using several different runtimes such as Liberty for Java, Ruby, Node.js or your own buildpack. You can add other DevOps services such as Delivery Pipeline and Git Hosting. Or you can data management services, such as SQL Database, JSON Database, MySQL and others. There is also support for Mobile services, sush as Push, CloudCode and Twilio. These are only a few of the services available on Bluemix.
I expect that eventually IBM will provide all their products such as a service on Bluemix.
As a developer, you can interact with the Bluemix infrastructure by using a browser-based user interface. You can also use a Cloud Foundry command line interface, called cf, to deploy web applications. Bluemix has a dashboard that allows you to see the status of all your applications. You can also make all configuration changes within a single use interface and have access to a large catalog of services to choose from the Bluemix GUI.
Auto scaling is a cloud service that automatically adds or removes compute resources depending upon the requirements of actual usage. This is not supported in Cloud Foundry, but provided as part of Bluemix at no charge. By using the auto scale service, you can scale your applications based on criteria that you define, such as heap or CPU usage.
Register for Bluemix at no charge. They don't need your credit card!
Go to www.bluemix.net to start your 30 day trial on Bluemix. Credit card is not required during trial period and you can have immediately have access to unlimited use of selected IBM services and can run applications up to 2 GB of total memory.
When the trial is over, you'll continue to use the runtimes for free for up to a certain limit and after that you'll pay for what you use above and beyond what is offered for free. As for services, some of the features charge a fixed monthly plan price, and others charge for metered use.
In short, Bluemix's pay-per-use model means minimal upfront application development cost for innovators, startups, entrepreneurs and developers and allow them to focus on the key business problems they want to solve. Check out https://console.ng.bluemix.net/#/pricing for the latest on pricing.