Getting a step closer to understanding IBM Bluemix
Bluemix is an open source Cloud Foundry-based platform as-a-service offering from IBM. Bluemix is not just a hosting of open source Cloud Foundry; Bluemix provides value additions such as:
- An intuitive dashboard to interact with the Cloud Foundry layer and to work with Bluemix
- A suite of enterprise middleware and software offered as services on Bluemix
- IBM support for the platform and IBM services
- Deployment models to choose from, such as public, dedicated, and local
- Rich IBM community business partners offering value added services
- Community support through the IBM developerWorks network
The following figure gives a high-level snapshot of what the Bluemix platform is composed of; Bluemix is not limited to what follows, but this figure gives a simplistic view of the components available on Bluemix for users to work with. Bluemix provides a rich and wide set of IBM software offered as managed services; these include services for application development and deployment known as DevOps services, services that enable hybrid applications to be developed and hosted through the use of integration services, cognitive services from Watson, Mobile services for mobile application development and management, data and analytics services to work with application data, and a host of runtime support for your applications, such as Java, NodeJS, Ruby, php, Python, Groovy, and so on:
High-level view of what Bluemix offers
You will also see here in the figure that Bluemix offers different compute options for your applications, based on your needs. In addition to the Cloud Foundry-based applications, you can also deploy your applications and host them on Bluemix by using a Docker container or open stack-based virtual machines. IBM also has announced the IBM Open Whisk compute environment, which is ideal for applications that are event-based. To know more about the compute options in Bluemix, refer to https://www.bluemix.net/docs/compute/index.html.
Understanding the Bluemix architecture
Bluemix is a Cloud Foundry-based platform as-a-service offering from IBM. Cloud Foundry is the open source standard for PaaS. To understand in-depth details on cloud foundry internals, you can refer to http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/ .
The following figure gives a high-level overview of Bluemix architecture. We will scope our discussion to the public deployment model of Bluemix; however, for dedicated and local Bluemix deployments (about which we shall learn more later in the chapter), the Bluemix internals based on Cloud Foundry architecture remain the same; what would change is the infrastructure on which Bluemix is hosted:
Bluemix high level overview
In the preceding figure, you can see that Bluemix is hosted on Softlayer infrastructure. An application hosted on Bluemix would run within the VM on Softlayer, each of the VMs will have resource isolation through containers, and each container will have the runtime and framework components necessary to run an application.
Applications on Bluemix are monitored for their health and managed by an application manager. Developers can use a browser or the cloud foundry command line client to work with Bluemix. The details on Bluemix UI are discussed in future sections of this chapter; we will also be discussing details on working with Bluemix using the cloud foundry command line in future chapters.
Bluemix catalog offers services that are hosted on Bluemix or those that run outside of it. Services are IBM provided, community-based, or third-party software or middleware that is offered from the Bluemix platform as-a-service, which is, in other words, ready-to-use software that is billed on a pay as you use model, without prior license purchase and so on.
