Codename: BlueMix – IBM's New PaaS Offering | Hacker News Reader

Codename: BlueMix – IBM's New PaaS Offering

ace.ng.bluemix.net

62 pointscylo37 comments

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

Well at least they do approve the beta requests quickly. It seems to be based on http://cloudfoundry.com/, which isn't obvious from their initial landing page.

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

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

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.

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 ...

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

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!

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?

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)

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

Truth, well actually a V8 port - https://github.com/andrewlow/v8ppc

Oh well, my memory failed me!

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

What happened to IBM's 'SmartCloud Enterprise'?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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'.

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

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.

You may want to check out the following offerings:

- https://appsdeck.eu/

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

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.

I'm here if you want to talk about : https://twitter.com/waxzce

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

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

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