
Codename: BlueMix – IBM's New PaaS Offering - cylo
https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/
======
tedsuo
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
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.

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abstrct
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](http://pic.twitter.com/iPqCk1J3x8)

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650REDHAIR
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
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.

~~~
cschmidt
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.

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

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dalek2point3
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...](http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/infosphere-streams/)

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

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pmuellr
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...](https://hub.jazz.net/project/pmuellr/bluemix-hello-
node/overview)

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!

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blakesterz
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
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)

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

~~~
spiritwalkerca
Truth, well actually a V8 port -
[https://github.com/andrewlow/v8ppc](https://github.com/andrewlow/v8ppc)

~~~
AYBABTME
Oh well, my memory failed me!

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

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joelennon
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
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?

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CoffeeDregs
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.

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darkr
What happened to IBM's 'SmartCloud Enterprise'?

edit: Ahh > [http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/why-ibm-
phasing-o...](http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/why-ibm-phasing-out-
smartcloud-enterprise-favor-softlayer)

------
l33tfr4gg3r
Simple nodejs app up and running from one of their samples.
[http://powernode.ng.bluemix.net/](http://powernode.ng.bluemix.net/)

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

------
yeukhon
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.

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

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

------
jmnicolas
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
You may want to check out the following offerings:

\- [https://appsdeck.eu/](https://appsdeck.eu/)

\- [http://www.clever-cloud.com/](http://www.clever-cloud.com/)

~~~
jmnicolas
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.

~~~
waxzce
I'm here if you want to talk about :
[https://twitter.com/waxzce](https://twitter.com/waxzce)

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

~~~
bmbelgod
It's now available to all at
[https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/index.jsp](https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/index.jsp)

