IBM Bluemix overview

In this article I’m presenting an IBM Bluemix overview. IBM Bluemix is the IBM open cloud platform that provides mobile and web developers access to IBM software for integration, security, transaction, and other key functions, as well as software from business partners.

The most distinctive services on Bluemix are based on IBM Watson: a cognitive system that provides natural language processing, hypothesis generation and evaluation, and dynamic learning.

Bluemix provides the following features:

• A range of services that enable you to build and extend web and mobile applications fast.
• Processing power for you to deliver application changes continuously.
• Fit-for-purpose programming models and services.
• Manageability of services and applications.
• Optimized and elastic workloads.
• Continuous availability.

It’s very fast to develop and deploy an application in one of your favourite programming languages. You can develop mobile application in iOS, Android, and HTML with JavaScript. For web application you can use languages such as Ruby, PHP, Java, Go, and Python.

When you deploy an application to Bluemix, you must configure Bluemix with enough information to support the application. For a mobile application Bluemix contains an artifact that represents the mobile back end, such as the services that are used by the mobile application to communicate with a server. For a web application you must ensure that information about the proper runtime and framework is communicated to Bluemix, so that it can set up the proper execution environment to run the application.

In this IBM Bluemix overview it’s important to me show the great value of service available on the platform. A service is a cloud extension that is hosted by Bluemix. The service provides functionality that is ready-for-use by the application’s running code. The predefined services that are provided by Bluemix include database, messaging, push notifications for mobile applications, and elastic caching for web applications.

For example a developed a simple application using the Node.js runtime and IBM Watson Social Insights services.

I used IBM Insights for Twitter to incorporate Twitter content from the Twitter streams into my IBM Bluemix application. The content store is refreshed and indexed in real-time, making searches dynamic and fast. The service enriches Tweets with sentiment and other insights for multiple languages, based on deep natural language processing algorithms from IBM Social Media Analytics.

After this IBM Bluemix overview try yourself to develop an application with a Bluemix account, you can get 30-day trial for free here.

enjoy !