An Overview of IBM Bluemix

Cloud computing services have taken the world by storm. As per Gartner predictions “by year 2023, 70% of global organizations have their more than two containerized applications in production”. Several cloud vendors are marking this space with their presence with a plethora of service offerings to name a few are IBM, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba and so on. 

In today’s article, we would venture more in detail about IBM Bluemix which is a mix of IaaS and PaaS offering, its features, architecture, use cases and so on.

What is IBM Bluemix?

In the year 2013, IBM acquired a company called SoftLayer, which was a public cloud platform which served as the foundation for its IaaS offering. In 2016 last quarter, IBM rolled out the SoftLayer brand under Bluemix brand of PaaS offerings.

IBM Bluemix has a market share of 1.87% and its major competitors are Netlify, Microsoft, Firebase, Google App Engine, Salesforce lightning platform, Acquia cloud, Heroku, PowerBuilder and Quick base.

It is a popular open standard cloud platform which allows to build, manage and run applications and services of all types. The platform provides instant environments to developers to work on any runtime language as they choose.

It also offers integration with a set of tools which helps developers and operation teams to develop, monitor, deploy and log an entire application in a collaborative manner. Integration of application as team by creating tool chains for hassle-free deployment using IBM Bluemix. It allows to build hybrid cloud environments as per business needs and flexible pricing options is a bonus. 

IBM Bluemix Deployment Options

IBM Bluemix provides public, dedicated and local deployment options:

Public

As a Public offering it is a multi-tenanted PaaS and let developers or teams give flexibility to develop any kind of solutions spanning from mobile applications, big data and analytics.

Dedicated

Dedicated Bluemix provides physically isolated hardware in an IBM data center. It is a single tenanted SoftLayer architecture not shared with any other users and is provisioned on a combination of bare metal and virtual machines

Local

Bluemix local is delivered as a service within the firewall boundaries of enterprise on your own infrastructure or on a pre-integrated converged infrastructure.

Hybrid

A hybrid Bluemix model could be a combination of services of local, dedicated or public as per the need. 

Features of IBM Bluemix

  • Reduction in time to provision applications and infrastructure
  • Allows for flexible capacity
  • Help to address lack of internal technical resources
  • Accelerates exploration of new workloads; inclusive social, mobile and big data

Use cases

  • IBM Bluemix location is ideal where customer do not want to move to the cloud for various reasons such as security, compliance and legal etc. 
  • Where customer wants to reuse and leverage infrastructure investment already made
  • To improve performance of hybrid applications 

IBM Bluemix Architecture & Micro services

Below diagram explains the architecture:

Micro services:

  • Proxy – component developed in NodeJs, functions as gateway mobile applications, manages incoming requests, directing them to internal components for processing, via services and operations configured in API management. Data masking and keep it in cache for quick access.
  • Cache – Bluemix service which masks information to end user for security so that different identifiers maintained in session cannot be traced back .
  • API Management – Bluemix service which manages and consume services which are exposed on public cloud on other deployed components of Bluemix.
  • Database – Service database Bluemix (DBaaS) has all information managed by components deployed in Bluemix persisted.
  • Workload Scheduler – service allows, through previous configuration automatic calls to REST services.

Leave a Comment

Select your currency
USD United States (US) dollar