Ever wondered to develop a software application using agile development methodology and continuous integration without the overheads of setting up a complex development environment? Ever wondered to distribute software applications with iterative enhancements and fixes, directly to your customers?
BlueMix - IBM is the way to explore! "A platform where developers can act like kids in a sandbox..." BlueMix is built on top of Cloud Foundry (PaaS) leveraging the power and flexibility offered by Softlayer (IaaS)
So let's start understanding Cloud Foundry now.
Cloud Foundry (CF) is a popular Cloud Computing Platform as a Service funded by VMware and EMC Corporation. As it's an open source project many experts refer it as Open Cloud for Platform as a Service (PaaS) where applications could be deployed, executed and scaled dynamically. Often, enterprise scale applications, due to their complexity, demand special skills to deploy and configure. Cloud Foundry PaaS eliminates this cost.
At a very high level CF has the following components
- Self-service application execution engine: Manages executing application instances, tracks started instances and broadcast status messages
- An automation engine for application deployment and lifecycle management: An orchestration process that governs the sequence of events to install, deploy and configure applications
- Scriptable command line interface (CLI): Used for deploying and managing applications in Cloud Foundry
These components aid the developers to create cloud based applications, push the apps (deploy) to stage them on the cloud infrastructure, trouble shoot when needed. As developers, we also understand that applications require various types of Runtimes, which are provided by Buildpacks. The moment an application is pushed to the CF, it examines the application artifacts, detect which runtimes are required and applies the respective buildpacks. CF by default provides System Buildpacks (java, node.js, GO, PHP, Python, Ruby) also there are many Community provided buildpacks (hosted on github)
Upcoming... Part 2 - Deployment of an application on Cloud Foundation (CF) and discuss the relationship between BlueMix and CF
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