IBM Launches Codename – BlueMix as a New Platform as a Service (PaaS) Offering

What is IBM Codename: BlueMix? It is a PaaS offering from IBM based on open standards and cloud to build, deploy, manage and run omni-channel applications like web and mobile, big data and other smart services.

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a service model where providers deliver not only infrastructure but also middleware (databases, messaging engines and so on) and solution stacks for application build, development and deploy.

BlueMix, currently offered in beta, is a new development environment built on Cloud Foundry for the cloud era to build applications rapidly and incrementally composed from services. Open standards allow developers to avoid vendor lock-in, leveraging the open and flexible cloud environment using a variety of tools from IBM, third party or open technologies.

BlueMix offers more than 200 software and middleware patterns available from IBM and IBM Business Partners to help enterprise and born-on-the-cloud developers develop portable and compatible applications for hybrid cloud. Pre-built services make application assembly very easy. BlueMix provides an integrated experience for the developers with DevOps in the cloud and thus helps them build enterprise and mobile applications quickly and more efficiently.

BlueMix DevOps provides a facility to store and manage code by means of Git repository. If offers a built-in web integrated development environment (IDE) and easy integrations with popular development tools like Eclipse and Visual Studio. It also provides for Agile planning, tracking and team collaboration and offers services for automatic application deployment

BlueMix DevOps allows developers to transform an idea to an application faster, hiding the complexities associated with hosting and managing cloud-based applications so that developers can just focus on development. BlueMix can automatically scale a deployed application up or down based on application usage.

BlueMix supports a variety of popular programming languages and frameworks like Android, iOS, HTML/JavaScript, Java, Ruby and PHP are offered in BlueMix environment.

BlueMix deploys virtual containers utilizing OpenStack to host deployed applications as indicated in the diagram. Users interact with the infrastructure by BlueMix user interface, a web-based user interface (UI). A command line tool cf is used to deploy web applications.

Clients (mobile applications or web applications hosted externally or on BlueMix or human users using web browsers) can use REST/HTTP application programming interfaces (API) to interact with the hosted applications.