Achieving Developer Nirvana With Codename: BlueMix

By: Ryan Baxter@ryanjbaxter

http://ryanjbaxter.com

Not The Band

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Definition

nirvana/nərˈvänə,nir-/

In the Buddhist tradition, nirvana is described as the extinguishing of the fires that cause suffering.

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Does This Sound Like Dev Nirvana? Install runtime, container, and all libraries

Install needed services (databases, mobile, etc)

Bind the services to the application, ports/ips/firewalls

Setup dynamic routing and load-balancer

Setup four layers of built-in High-Availability

Setup streaming logging aggregation

Setup application performance monitoring

Scale the application up to X instances

Then repeat for dev, test, and production

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What Is BlueMix? A platform for running virtually any application in

the cloud without having to worry about the hardware, software, and networking needed to do so.

This definition is usually what we refer to as a platform-as-a-service or PaaS

BlueMix is similar to other platforms you may have heard of Heroku, Google App Engine, OpenShift, Pivotal One

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How Everything Fits Together A PaaS is software that is

usually running on top of an IaaS and abstracts the complexities of the IaaS away BlueMix runs on top of

Softlayer

Your app runs on top of BlueMix and has no knowledge of the IaaS layer

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IaaS (Softlayer)

PaaS (BlueMix)

Your App

Why Not Just Use IaaS? It might be just as easy to get started at the IaaS

layer if you use a prebuild image Over time though the maintenance of this image

increases the cost OS updates, security updates, new versions of libraries,

DNS and networking changes, configuration and maintenance of other services like DBs, etc

At the PaaS layer all of this cost disappears! The platform takes care of it for you!

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Benefits Of Using BlueMix Save time by just worrying about the code and not

the infrastructure Quickly get your app in the hands of your users –

deploying your app is a matter of running a single command

Easily add functionality to your application using IBM and partner provided services

Use the languages, runtimes, and frameworks that you are most familiar with

SoftLayer

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BlueMix Open Beta BlueMix is currently in open

beta, you need to register to get going During the beta you get 8GB

of memory to use across as many apps as you want and can provision up to 20 services

Register at bluemix.net, you need an IBM ID

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Lets Deploy An App!

App to enable anyone to ask questions for a session…but we can make it even easier.

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Cloud Foundry And BlueMix BlueMix is built upon an open

source project called Cloud Foundry IBM contributes to the project and

is a founding member of the Cloud Foundry Foundation

All tools, documentation, and samples for Cloud Foundry are relevant and can be used with BlueMix

Buildpacks, Services, CLI, Scaling, etc are Cloud Foundry concepts

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Runtimes And Buildpacks One of the benefits of BlueMix is that it supports

virtually any runtime you may want to use This is accomplished a psuedo-standard called

buildpacks BlueMix has 4 built in buildpacks

Java Liberty, Node.js, Sinatra, and Ruby On Rails

If you are pushing an application using one of these languages you do not need to specify a buildpack to use, BlueMix installs it for you

Other runtimes are supported via community buildpacks

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You Choose The Runtime!

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Buildpack Anatomy

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Runtime

Container Libraries

Application

Buildpack

BlueMix Services Services allow you to add

functionality to your application with minimal cost and effort Select service and plan, then

bind to your application

Once a service is bound to your application information to use the service is available in an environment variable called VCAP_SERVICES

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The Cloud Foundry Command Line (CLI) The command line will most likely be your tool of

choice when doing anything with BlueMix Anything you will want to do in BlueMix can be

accomplished using the CLI

Pushing An Application, stopping, starting, restarting, deleting

Create, bind, and unbind services View and tail application logs Documentation:

http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/devguide/installcf/whats-new-v6.html

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Pushing An Application You can push an application

using the cf push command What you push depends on the

runtime you will use, for Java you may push a war or jar, for Node.js you will push the app directory

cf push will push everything in the current directory unless you specify the –p option

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Manifest Files cf push commands can become very verbose

cf push appName –p myapp.war –b https://github.com/ryanjbaxter/mybuildpack -i 5 –m 512M --no-start

To avoid having to type this you can use a manifest file When using a manifest file you just execute cf push and

the CLI will look for manifest.mf in the current directory

Manifest Generator: http://cfmanigen.ng.bluemix.net

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Sample Manifest File Command Linecf push appName –p myapp.war –b https://github.com/ryanjbaxter/mybuildpack -i 5 –m 512M --no-start

manifest.mf File---applications:- name: appName memory: 513M instances: 5buildpack: https://github.com/ryanjbaxter/mybuildpackservices: - todo-mongo-db

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Logging Logging is the first step in figuring out what is

wrong You application’s logs will be written to stderr.log and stdout.log

Logs can be viewed in the BlueMix UI by selecting your applications runtime

Logs can be tailed from the command line – very useful! cf logs appName

cf logs appName --recent – shows you the most recent logs

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Scaling BlueMix allows you to scale

your application horizontally and vertically within minutes

If the load on your application increases/decreases you may want to adjust the number of instances to handle the load

If you find the resources available to your app is tight you can increase the memory

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Dev Ops Services

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• DevOps Solution in the cloud for building mobile and cloud applications

• Optimized for use with BlueMix

• Integrated task tracking, agile planning, source control with auto deploy

• Use your favorite tools or work from the Web IDE

• Hosted Jazz SCM or Git or link to GitHub

• Public and private projects

• Continuous Integration and Deployment with Jenkins

• Mobile quality and application performance monitoring (coming)

Resources Documentation: https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/

index.jsp developerWorks: http://developer.ibm.com/bluemix

Sample Apps & Tutorials: https://www.ibmdw.net/bluemix/docs/articles/, https://www.ibmdw.net/bluemix/docs/sample-code/

Developer Forum: https://www.ibmdw.net/answers/?community=bluemix

Blog: https://www.ibmdw.net/bluemix/blog/

Twitter: #BlueMix, @IBMBlueMix

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Resources From Today Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/RyanBaxter/dev-

nirvanabluemix Code:

https://github.com/CodenameBlueMix/session-questions

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Thank you.Join the beta at: www.bluemix.net

Backup

Creating Apps In The BlueMix UI You can create an

application in the BlueMix UI by going to the catalog and choosing a boilerplate or runtime

Boilerplate = code + service

Runtime = code

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Using The Dashboard You will be brought

to the dashboard which will now have a tile for your app

Click the tile to see additional details about your app

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View The Guide To Download The Source

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Updating The Source Downloading the source code may be good for

learning but you are most likely not going to use any of it In fact it is not even necessary to create an app in the UI

first

You will want to download and install the Cloud Foundry Command Line tool in order to upload / create your application Follow the documentation here:

http://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/BuildingWeb.jsp#install-cf

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