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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
