Ten Minutes Bluemix Pitch from Dev to Dev

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hi everybody, Niklas Heidloff here. As a developer advocate for Bluemix I regularly talk with other developers about the capabilities and benefits of IBM Bluemix. In these conversations I often use a pitch similar to the one in this video.
• #3: So what is Bluemix? Bluemix is IBM's platform to host your applications in the cloud. The huge benefit of cloud platforms is that you don't have to set up any server side infrastructure yourself. As a developer you can focus on writing code. You can also leverage many Bluemix services rather than having to reinvent the wheel. This allows you to develop innovative applications more rapidly than ever before.
• #4: In order to get started Bluemix provides a simple graphical user experience on bluemix.net where you can register and start creating applications and services. In the easiest case you can use starters which demonstrate typical application types and services and they come with sample code. For example the Java Cloudant web starter shows how to develop a Java application accessing the NoSQL database Cloudant.
• #5: The same web user interface also provides manageability functionality to track applications, for example their memory usage, logging information and so forth. This sample application news-aggregator uses two instances with 512 MB memory and several services. Also another key advantage of hosting applications in the cloud is the easy horizontal scalability by adding more instances either manually or even automatically.
• #6: In order to deploy applications to Bluemix, we provide three different mechanisms to package applications. All of them are based on standards so that you could theoretically even deploy your same applications to platforms of other vendors. We support Cloud Foundry, Docker and also Virtual Machines based on Open Stack if you want to use Bluemix as an Infrastructure as a Service. With these different alternatives Bluemix can be used to host different types of applications on one platform. Personally I think the easiest way to get stared with Bluemix is to use the Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service model. As a developer you simply write your application and use one of the available Cloud Foundry buildpacks. For example as Java developer you develop a war file, refer to one of the Java buildpacks and push the war file to Bluemix. Bluemix also supports many other buildpacks dependent on what type of application server you need. There are buildpacks for Node.js, PHP, Python and you can even bring your own buildpack. Additionally Bluemix provides the hosting of Docker containers in the cloud. Applications packaged via Docker images can easily be ported to different environments, not only Bluemix but also on premises environments or other cloud platforms. There is a huge set of Docker images available that you can use as starting points to package your applications with the necessary application servers and infrastructure you need.
• #7: Dependent on the application packaging there are different ways to deploy applications. You can use command line interfaces like "cf" to deploy Cloud Foundry applications and the command line interface "cf ic" for containers which is very similar to the Docker command line interface. There are also graphical tools to deploy applications to Bluemix like the Eclipse plugin and various other plugins for popular build and continuous integration tools like Maven, Gradle and Jenkins. Bluemix also comes with DevOps capabilities like source control management, project management and even a web IDE to do simple modifications of your applications without having to install a local IDE. Most importantly Bluemix provides delivery pipelines to build and deploy applications on the server side. In the easiest case you can push code changes via Git and the new version of the application is deployed automatically to the cloud without any downtime of your production application. This capability is important for developers today who are responsible for the complete development cycle up to the deployment and testing in production environments. The Bluemix DevOps capabilities together with hosting options for Cloud Foundry and Docker applications including auto-scalability and load balancing also provide a great platform to host cloud native applications and microservices.
• #8: What I like most about Bluemix are the services that you can use to quickly build new applications. At this point there are more than 100 services provided by IBM and the community. The first thing you typically need for new applications are databases. Bluemix supports databases like Mongo, Cloudant, Postgres, NoSQL, relational, graph databases and so forth. There are also various services for big data and analytics like the new Apache Spark service with Jupyter notebooks as well as data warehousing via DashDB. With the Twitter Insights service you can analyze tweets. Since enterprises don't start from scratch when implementing new apps in the cloud, Bluemix provides services to access existing applications, services and data behind the firewall and you can use existing organization directories to authenticate users. With the Internet of Things service you can connect various devices to the cloud in a secure manner and communicate between these devices and the cloud in both directions, for example to receive sensor data and to send commands. There is also a graphical tool to easily build flows for Internet of Things scenarios.
• #9: There are also tools you need to build web applications or your own server side services, for example various caching services, services for messaging, a scheduler, API management, globalization and more. With Bluemix you can build backend functionality for mobile apps, both for native iOS and Android apps and hybrid apps. There is a server side data store which can be synchronized to local devices, there are server side logging and quality assurance dashboards and you can use push notifications. Additionally there are cognitive services to make your applications smarter. For example via the Personality Insights service you can build highly personalized user experiences. There are also services for speech and visual recognition to name just a few.
• #10: As I've described Bluemix provides a lot of capabilities to build powerful cloud applications in little time. In addition to that it's also a lot of fun to build cool apps and learn new technologies. For example I built a simple selfie drone demo where a drone can take off, take some pictures, recognize faces and tweet them.
• #11: In another sample I developed an Android app to steer a Sphero ball over the internet using Watson's speech recognition service. Similarly you can also steer and Lego Mindstorms robot.
• #12: The Hear the Buzz app allows searching for certain topics with positive and negative sentiments on Twitter and it displays and reads the tweets on iPhones and Apple Watches.
• #13: Bluemix is available as a public multi-tenant cloud offering with data centers in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Customers can also leverage the dedicated Bluemix offering and choose one of the over 25 worldwide data center locations. For the most sensitive workloads IBM plans to provide a private Bluemix offering where Bluemix is installed on premises. Regardless of which combination you choose, you can expect a single seamless experience to manage your applications.
• #14: In order to get started with Bluemix you can go to bluemix.net and register for a free 30 days trial without having to provide a credit card. During that time you can try all services for free and run several applications. Even after the trial you can use free plans of most services which are restricted but allow you to try services first before you need to pay. Similarly you can run some applications with restricted memory for free to try Bluemix functionality. After the evaluation phase Bluemix provides pay-as-you-go payments as well as subscriptions.
• #15: In addition to bluemix.net there are many other resources available to learn Bluemix. There is the official documentation, most services come with sample code and API explorers, there is a Bluemix developer site with an active blog and more and more developers use StackOverflow for development related questions. To stay up to date with Bluemix news, check out the news aggregator on bluemix.info and the Bluemix Twitter account @IBMBluemix. And last but not least there are a lot of articles about Bluemix published in various places. Use Google to find these for your specific interests. I hope this video was helpful to explain the great capabilities of Bluemix. If you haven't done yet, I encourage you to just try it and start building innovative cloud applications.