Cloud computing is an important transformative force defining the technology landscape today. Cloud computing has changed the way technology can be built and used for business, industry, governance, academia, and the like. Cloud technology is also considered as a key enabler to building innovations that define newer markets. Given the importance and relevance of this space, it is but natural to consider talking about one such cloud platform called Bluemix, which is a platform as-a-service (PaaS) offering from IBM.
This book is an attempt to compile illustrative descriptions for the different capabilities offered by Bluemix. The intended audience for this book is developers who are relatively new to the space of application development on a platform as-a-service environment. This book also serves to jumpstart developers who want to learn and use IBM Bluemix.
This book gives you the levers to understand Bluemix as a platform, learn how to use the value-added services on Bluemix, understand how to build, manage, and monitor applications on Bluemix, discover the options of deployment on Bluemix, and above all, witness the ease and the innovative approach to discover and cater to different types of use cases solving problems in varied categories.
This book is written in a simple, appealing, explanatory format with sufficient visual aids in the form of screenshots so that it is easy to follow even for those of you who are not very technical. As the author of this book, I am certain that you will experience a learning that you can build upon later; you will find that this provides an apt landing platform from where you are equipped to take the plunge.
Chapter 1, Saying Hello to IBM Bluemix, covers cloud computing and cloud service delivery models, and then lets us take a look at what Bluemix is. It also covers the different ways in which the platform is offered, along with an introduction to the IBM Bluemix public offering.
Chapter 2, Building and Deploying Your First Hello World Application on Bluemix, introduces you to application building on IBM Bluemix. You will learn how to build a simple application on Bluemix and deploy and run it.
Chapter 3, Extending an Application and Configuring for Continuous Delivery Using DevOps Services, teaches you how to extend existing applications on Bluemix to build additional functionality using some of the value-added services on Bluemix; this is illustrated along with a sample application.
Chapter 4, Leveraging On-Premise Software for Applications on Bluemix, demonstrates a very important aspect of modern application building environment, called hybrid cloud. We will see how on-premise or local software or applications can be leveraged to integrate with newer applications that are to be deployed on public cloud infrastructure.
Chapter 5, Scaling Applications in Bluemix, introduces you to application scaling. You will learn about the scaling options supported on Bluemix: manual and auto-scaling.
Chapter 6, Monitoring and Management in Bluemix, discusses the different services that can be used to monitor and manage applications. You will learn to work with the Monitoring and Analytics service for a web application deployed on Bluemix. Additionally, the chapter introduces readers to NewRelic, which is a third-party service on Bluemix.
Chapter 7, Compute Options on Bluemix, covers the different compute options available on Bluemix, such as containers, Cloud Foundry applications, virtual servers, and Open Whisk.
Chapter 8, Security Services on Bluemix, talks about the security services available on Bluemix and elaborates two of the available security services in Bluemix. You will learn how to offload the web application authentication functionality to the Single Sign On service on Bluemix.
Chapter 9, Microservices-based Application Development on Bluemix, talks about an architecture pattern for application development on the cloud, called the Microservices architecture pattern. You will also learn how to use Bluemix and services on Bluemix to build and deploy applications that employ the microservices architecture.
Chapter 10, Mobile Application Development on Bluemix, introduces you to services offered on Bluemix that are specifically for mobile application development. You will learn how to use some of these services to build a simple mobile catalog application.
Here's what you require for this book:
Cloud Foundry CLI (the latest version available)
Eclipse IDE (v4.4 or later)
This book is aimed at developers seeking to learn application development and deployment methods on IBM Bluemix. A basic knowledge of Java and Node.js is assumed.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You will notice that the deployable artifact for your application is the webApp.war file."
A block of code is set as follows:
@Override
protected void init(VaadinRequest vaadinRequest) {
Responsive.makeResponsive(this);
setLocale(vaadinRequest.getLocale());
getPage().setTitle("MyVaadinApp");
showMainView();
}New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Enter your LinkedIn credentials and click Allow access."
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