Bluemix is offered as a public multi-tenanted platform as-a-service offering. Public Bluemix is available currently in three datacenters (at the time of writing this book). Public Bluemix is great for startups, open community developers, freelance developers, students, and for specific requirements of small to medium or even large enterprises. This is a great platform for experimenting with technology, building the quick and dirty prototypes, and also, a platform for building and hosting business applications that are not stringent on regulatory and compliance requirements. As discussed in this chapter and for most of this book, we will be using public Bluemix, which can be accessed from www.bluemix.net .

Unlike public Bluemix, dedicated Bluemix is hosted on a single tenanted dedicated Softlayer infrastructure. If you want a dedicated Bluemix setup, then the infrastructure underlying this dedicated Bluemix is also dedicated to you. The hardware is not shared with any other users. Dedicated Bluemix makes a hybrid environment possible, where you can leverage the advantages of cloud development along with the data from within your enterprise.

Dedicated Bluemix  can be set up to sit within your enterprise VPN network and user identity management can be integrated to your enterprise identity management system. This will allow dedicated Bluemix to be a platform that is truly dedicated and customizable for your enterprise. Services on dedicated Bluemix can be customized based on what you really need, as opposed to out of the box catalog.

Dedicated Bluemix is suitable for application deployments that have greater security, regulatory, and compliance requirements. Also, in cases where there is a need to have greater control over audit data or application data, this kind of Bluemix deployment is suggested.

Apart from the regular Bluemix dashboard, dedicated Bluemix has what is called the admin console. This is an operations console that the administrators of the dedicated Bluemix environment within your organization can use to manage and administer the Bluemix platform within their enterprise. The functions that can be carried out using the admin console would be as follows:

Another important aspect worth mentioning about dedicated Bluemix is the syndicated catalog. Dedicated Bluemix provides the ability for its users to use software services across their public or dedicated Bluemix environments. A single palette of services catalog is displayed to the dedicated Bluemix user, from where he can choose services that he would like to use for his application. Dedicated services are marked with a red icon on the top right, as shown in the following screenshot; the grayed-out service is one that is turned off or made unavailable for the given organization in the dedicated Bluemix through the admin console, which was discussed earlier. Services that are from public Bluemix syndicated to the dedicated Bluemix catalog are shown in a separate category of services and they do not have the red icon to the top right corner, as was the case with dedicated services.

The pricing and support models are also different from public Bluemix. To learn more about dedicated Bluemix you can refer to http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/dedicated/ .

Bluemix delivered as a service within the firewall boundaries of your enterprise on your infrastructure or within your datacenter is called local Bluemix. You can imagine it to be a private cloud offering a PaaS platform. The core Bluemix platform is the same across public, dedicated, or local.

Local Bluemix is typically useful where the sensitivity, privacy, and security needs of applications and application data is very stringent. An example would be government agencies or government bodies; they are usually governed by very strict regulatory and compliance standards and often would need hosting and operating environments that are mostly under their control.

The architecture of Bluemix local is given in detail at http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/local/imgs/the-architects-guide-to-bluemix-local.pdf .