Codename: BlueMix – IBM's New PaaS Offering

https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/

by cylo • 12 years ago

62 37 12 years ago

ace.ng.bluemix.net

Wyrmkill• 12 years ago

Nice to see IBM getting in the game with some tools that aren't dauntingly enterprisey

650REDHAIR• 12 years ago

It looks neat, but wow, I don't think that registration process could have been any worse.

Have any of you HN'ers been accepted into the beta? Thoughts?

carlosdp• 12 years ago

I agree, looks like a very cool product, but really? Only alphanumeric, dashes, period, underscore, and @ symbol in password and no spaces? Why? And why not put that information on the form instead of in another link and not say why the password was rejected?

Why is there a time limit of a few minutes on the confirmation code? I feel like I have to race the clock in order to register.

I wish they had made a separate registration that matched the actual product's less-corporate style.

yeukhon2• 12 years ago

Still saner than this http://i.imgur.com/hvyziAx.png (USCIS password requirement).

cschmidt2• 12 years ago

My code didn't come by the end of the countdown. I sat there and watched it tick down for a few minutes. It just arrived, a minute or so late. Great job IBM.

yahelc• 12 years ago

I got approved for the Beta ~5 minutes after applying, so it seems like it's a pretty quick turnaround.

kenlin• 12 years ago

I registered just before 7:30am Eastern today and got two emails...

@7:29am - Thanks for your interest in Codename BlueMix. We hope to reward your courage soon with a membership. We will be in touch shortly.

@7:37am - You have been accepted as a BlueMix beta member.

abstrct• 12 years ago

I had my registration to the beta accepted within less than a minute. The interface is impressively slick. I honestly didn't know IBM had it in them but they did a really nice job on it.

That's just my initial thoughts though. Now I need to sit down and actually deploy something to it.

At least one aspect was a bit amusing: http://pic.twitter.com/iPqCk1J3x8

yeukhon2• 12 years ago

The screenshots need to be enlargable. No point of showing a tiny screesnshot if I couldn't enlarge the picture. Anyway, eagerly awaiting for approval. I supposed this is IBM's effort of openstack for 2-3 years.

blakesterz• 12 years ago

So this is a realllly dumb dumb question... but I'll ask anyways, what the heck can I do with this? Build an app, yes, got it, but... what? Like if you said build a wordpress site I'd get it, but what kind of app can I build? to do what? And that app runs on what?

fennecfoxen• 12 years ago

Looks like you can build anything that you could build with java/ruby/node code. And they would launch as many servers as you needed given the amount of traffic that it got. And you'd put the data into a nearby managed database like... Mongo (ew) or Postgres. Not listed: what operating system is running down there (going to guess Linux, since I don't know what building various binary ruby / node modules would actually look like on AIX :P)

AYBABTME2• 12 years ago

Funny, I remember a few months ago, an IBM employee at our Ottawa JS meetup explained how he ported Node to PowerPC.

johnward• 12 years ago

It's similar to other Platform as a Service options. You build the app you want. The benefit is that you don't have to worry about setting up and scaling the architecture. For example you could deploy WordPress on AppFog PaaS. I don't think bluemix officially support PHP but PHP is there. Blue mix supports node or rails. so basically any node or rails app you wanted to build could be hosted.

dalek2point3• 12 years ago

IBM actually has a really cool product for live streams of large datasets. Its called infosphere streams -- http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/infosphere-stream...

If they dont want to become "just another AWS" they'll have to start integrating some of these features in order to get devs to switch ...

utopkara• 12 years ago

I bet they haven't been sitting on their hands about this :-)

tedsuo• 12 years ago

BlueMix is IBM's rollout of the open source Cloud Foundry product (I work on Cloud Foundry). You can also check out our own example rollout at run.pivotal.io if you want to see how they stack up.

Veratyr• 12 years ago

Out of curiosity, what do you believe the advantages of Cloud Foundry over its competitors (such as Openshift) are?

I've used both, both as a developer and as a sysadmin and I have to say I like Openshift more. Mainly because of the ease of setup and the reliability. Cloud Foundry had issues for me.

CoffeeDregs• 12 years ago

Interesting. Python support is provided by Heroku build packs?

    To deploy Python applications to BlueMix, use
    $ cf push -b https://github.com/joshuamckenty/heroku-buildpack-python

Also, I don't see any pricing, so that's a little nervous-making.

Nice that you get an 8GB memory allocation to play with, though, shared amongst your various apps.

l33tfr4gg3r• 12 years ago

Simple nodejs app up and running from one of their samples. http://powernode.ng.bluemix.net/

The experience of deploying the Node app on Bluemix is very reminiscent of a Heroku deployment, IMO.

joelennon• 12 years ago

Also check out JazzHub, IBMs entry in the online software tools space. It provides source code management (unfortunately based on Rational Team Concert and not something like Git or Mercurial), agile tools and a decent web based code editor based on Eclipse Orion. It integrates nicely with BlueMix, you can one click deploy from within JazzHub.

I had early access to this so I could write an article for their developerWorks site on using the MEAN (mongo, express, angular and node) stack to build a polls app. The platform's not perfect, but its good to see IBM going in the right direction with this sort of stuff.

kossmoboleat• 12 years ago

I always thought RTC would not include a VCS. On wikipedia it mentions "source control" and a possible "integration with [..] Git". According to your comment this is not a simple seamless integration?

spiritwalkerca2• 12 years ago

Actually there's hosted Git as well. Create project, choose "Create a Git repository hosted at JazzHub". Orion has full Git support as well as the added Jazz SCM support for JazzHub.

jmnicolas2• 12 years ago

Yet another cloud offering with "NSA inside".

I'm so desperate for an alternative that I would rather put my data in North Korea if they had a cloud offer.

thibaut_barrere• 12 years ago

You may want to check out the following offerings:

- https://appsdeck.eu/

- http://www.clever-cloud.com/

jmnicolas2• 12 years ago

I'm French and I didn't know about these ! That means I'm probably reading too much American / English news ... or not enough ;-)

Thanks.

darkr• 12 years ago

What happened to IBM's 'SmartCloud Enterprise'?

edit: Ahh > http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/why-ibm-phasing-o...

joostdevries• 12 years ago

Cool: apparently it works with Heroko buildpacks. So I can deploy Play framework apps as well with the Heroku buildpack for Play.

rainmaking• 12 years ago

What a serious wording fail.

"A platform where developers can act like kids in a sandbox"

That sounds like they consider play a necessary evil.

jguimont• 12 years ago

Have you seen the intro to this (dated) video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=je1EXzdv-Aw

They explain why IBM did this in entreprisey wording. As if development should be slow and developers shouldn't be left alone 'Playing'.

honksillet• 12 years ago

"Create apps with the efficiency of a cold-blooded cyborg." That's good copy.

pmuellr• 12 years ago

There's a sample hello world node demo, with a README.md that explains all the bits, here:

https://hub.jazz.net/project/pmuellr/bluemix-hello-node/over...

The goal with the demo is just to show you how to get node code running on BlueMix; what code (in what language) you run is up to you!

senthilnayagam• 12 years ago

why do they want to keep documentation accessible to member only, enterprise mindset?

bmbelgod• 12 years ago

It's now available to all at https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/index.jsp

Codename: BlueMix – IBM's New PaaS Offering

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