Bluemix: Platform as a Service (PaaS) Offering of IBM

I believe by now, most of you have already heard about Bluemix, IBM's Plarform as a service (PaaS) solution for Cloud Computing. It's based on an open source cloud foundry platform. Bluemix adds additional values to cloud foundry by providing IBM specific services such as DB2 or Watson Services.

Bluemix lowers the barrier for app development. As a developer, you no longer need to maintain and worry about infrastructure. Plus you have the option to select from several different languages and services that's currently available on Bluemix.

Bluemix has structured around runtimes and services. Runtimes are the environments that your code is running. There are currently several runtimes available on Bluemix such as Java, NodeJs, Go, PHP, Python and Ruby. You can even bring your own buildpack and have your own runtime.

Bluemix is also rich in terms of the services. There are 4 levels of support for the services, i.e. IBM services which are developed, maintained and supported by IBM, Third Party services which are maintained by a third party such as Twilio, Community services which are maintained by the cloud foundry community and finally Experimental and Beta services also exist in Bluemix.

Services in Bluemix is categorized into various types. One of the most compelling reasons to use Bluemix is the variety of services that are available. For some of these services, you can only find them available on Bluemix. These services are usually IBM owned and therefore only available in Bluemix such as Watson -- a unique capability derived from IBM Watson. Some of the services are widely used services by the developers and therefore also available in Bluemix such as mysql or postgresql database. This post is short enough to cover all of the services in Bluemix, please visit Bluemix website to learn more about the services.

Another great feature of Bluemix is to combine the most frequently used runtimes and services and make it available as Boilerplates. In this way, you no longer need to create your runtime and add services one by one. Instead, it's already created for you with just a few clicks. There are variety of Boilerplates available in Bluemix such as Mobile Cloud Boilerplates which combines a Node JS runtime with Mobile Application Security, Push, Mobile Data and Mobile Quality Assurance services. Isn't it nice?

Last but not least, Bluemix has recently been evolved from just a PaaS. It now includes docker containers and virtual machines enabled by open stack.With these two, Bluemix now offers a full cloud development enviornment where everyone can find a way to fulfill their needs.

Finally, you can sign up Bluemix for a 1 month free trial period (no credit card required!). Then you'll be charged as you use the runtimes and services. You can find more information on pricing in this link. To learn more about Bluemix please visit the nice Bluemix documentation or developer community webpage.