Learning IBM Bluemix

Table of Contents

Learning IBM Bluemix

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

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Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Downloading the color images of this book 

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Saying Hello to IBM Bluemix

Understanding cloud service delivery models

Getting a step closer to understanding IBM Bluemix

Understanding the Bluemix architecture

Familiarizing yourself with Bluemix deployment models

Public Bluemix

Dedicated Bluemix

Local Bluemix

Getting an account on public Bluemix

Understanding the Bluemix dashboard

Key dashboard or Bluemix UI concepts

Account details

Organization

Managing your organization

Space

Creating your own Space

Managing your Space

Region

Summary

2. Building and Deploying Your First Application on IBM Bluemix

Cloud Foundry command line utility

Installing the Cloud Foundry command-line utility

Log in to Bluemix using cf cli

Log in to your Bluemix account

Building your first Hello World application and deploying it on Bluemix

Understanding some more Bluemix concepts

Creating your Hello World application on Bluemix using a boilerplate

Updating your application on Bluemix

Downloading the source files for your starter or Hello World application

Summary

3. Extending an Application and Configuring for Continuous Delivery Using DevOps Services

DevOps services and the delivery pipeline

Configuring the delivery pipeline for your application

Creating the sample application

Learning to wire applications using Node-RED

The ibmiot node

The debug node

The function node

The switch node

The template node

Configuring continuous delivery for your application

Editing the source using a web editor

Extending the application

Summary

4. Leveraging On-Premise Software for Applications on Bluemix

Services under the Integrate category

Creating an application on Bluemix

Wiring and configuring the flow

Downloading and installing MongoDB

Starting the MongoDB daemon and working with MongoDB

Creating the Secure Gateway service instance

Configuring the Secure Gateway service instance

Summary

5. Scaling Applications in Bluemix

Overview of scaling types supported in Bluemix

Vertical scaling

Horizontal scaling

Creating an application to scale on Bluemix

Configuring a load test for your application

Creating the BlazeMeter service instance

Creating the load test

Manually scaling your application

Scaling your application using the Auto-Scaling service in Bluemix

Creating the Auto-Scaling service instance

Binding the Auto-Scaling service instance to your application

Defining the scaling policy for your application

Summary

6. Monitoring and Management in Bluemix

Overview of monitoring and management services in Bluemix

Monitoring and Analytics service

Creating the Monitoring and Analytics service instance

Simulating events in your application

New Relic service

Creating the New Relic service instance

Binding the New Relic service to your application

Configuring the application to send events to the New Relic service

Simulating events in your application

Viewing reports in the New Relic dashboard for your monitored application

Summary

7. Compute Options on Bluemix

Cloud Foundry applications

Working with the eclipse plugin for Bluemix

Installing the eclipse plugin for Bluemix

Importing your Cloud Foundry application to Eclipse

Updating your application in Eclipse

Deploying updates to Bluemix using the Eclipse plugin

Containers

Creating an IBM Container with an existing image

Before you begin

Installing Docker

Installing Cloud Foundry CLI

Installing the IBM Containers Cloud Foundry plugin

Creating a container using the Bluemix dashboard

Working with the CF plugin for IBM Containers

Virtual servers

OpenWhisk

Installing the OpenWhisk CLI

Creating the trigger source for our demonstration

Creating an action

Creating a rule

Testing a rule

Summary

8. Security Services on Bluemix

Overview of the security services in the Bluemix catalog

Access Trail security service

Creating the Access Trail service instance

Working with the Access Trail service

Single Sign On security service

Creating a Single Sign On service instance

Configuring the identity sources in Single Sign On

Configuring the cloud directory

Configuring LinkedIn as an identity source

Configuring Google+ as an identity source

Create an application which will use the Single Sign On authentication service

Modify the sample application to enable the use of the Single Sign On service

Integrating the Single Sign On service with your application

Seeing it all work together

Summary

9. Microservices-based Application Development on Bluemix

Understanding the microservices architecture pattern

Developing a microservices-based application on Bluemix

Microservice 1

Microservice 3

Microservice 2

Wiring and configuring the flow

Seeing it all work together

Summary

10. Mobile Application Development on Bluemix

Mobile category services

Creating a mobile application

Creating a mobile project

Running the application on an Android emulator

Integrating Push Notifications to the application

Creating the Push Notifications service instance

Configuring the Push Notifications service instance

Integrating the Push Notifications service with an application

Sending Push Notifications to your application

Summary

Learning IBM Bluemix

Learning IBM Bluemix

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: October 2016

Production reference: 1171016

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78588-774-1

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Credits

About the Author

Sreelatha Sankaranarayanan has close to 16 years of experience in software engineering. She has been with Phoenix Global Solutions (now Tata Consultancy Services) for close to 2.5 years. She is currently with IBM India and has been with them for the last 13.5 years. During her career, she has been part of product development, support, and test teams, primarily working on enterprise middleware products. In her most recent role, she was responsible for evangelizing IBM's cloud platform as-a-service, Bluemix, and has worked with System Integrators, academia, and IBM partners to enable and support them with the adoption of IBM's cloud platform as-a-service, Bluemix. She has coauthored a redbook entitled B2B Solutions using WebSphere Partner Gateway v6.0, authored some developerWorks articles, and some blog posts on the Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP), Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud platform as-a-service (Bluemix). You can find her on Twitter at  @sreelathas and on LinkedIn at https://in.linkedin.com/in/sreelathas.

I thank Packt Publishing and Nitin Dasan for providing me with the opportunity and support to author this book. Special mention to the editorial reviewer, Priyanka Mehta, and the technical reviewer, Mohan P Annamalai (IBM), who have worked to refine each of the chapters in this book. We hope that you enjoy and learn as much as we, as author and reviewers, have enjoyed and learned putting this book together.

About the Reviewer

Mohan P Annamalai is a senior manager at IBM India Private Ltd, with 16 years of experience in the IT industry. He is currently responsible for driving the development efforts for Mobile Foundation Service on Bluemix. Prior to this, he successfully managed the efforts for setting up the IBM Push Notifications service on Bluemix. He was also responsible for driving IBM Bluemix eco system from India Software Labs in the year 2014. In this role, he worked with key IBM system integrators to gain interest on Bluemix. In his role as the IBM Bluemix program manager, he played a pivotal role in gaining mind share for IBM Bluemix among the developers and students in India. Apart from mobile and cloud, Mohan led the delivery of the analytics service component to power analytics in couple of key IBM solutions. He has also worked for Satyam Computer Services Limited. He started his career as a J2EE developer in connectivity and integration products and became a development manager in the same space.

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Preface

Cloud computing is an important transformative force defining the technology landscape today. Cloud computing has changed the way technology can be built and used for business, industry, governance, academia, and the like. Cloud technology is also considered as a key enabler to building innovations that define newer markets. Given the importance and relevance of this space, it is but natural to consider talking about one such cloud platform called Bluemix, which is a platform as-a-service (PaaS) offering from IBM.

This book is an attempt to compile illustrative descriptions for the different capabilities offered by Bluemix. The intended audience for this book is developers who are relatively new to the space of application development on a platform as-a-service environment. This book also serves to jumpstart developers who want to learn and use IBM Bluemix.

This book gives you the levers to understand Bluemix as a platform, learn how to use the value-added services on Bluemix, understand how to build, manage, and monitor applications on Bluemix, discover the options of deployment on Bluemix, and above all, witness the ease and the innovative approach to discover and cater to different types of use cases solving problems in varied categories.

This book is written in a simple, appealing, explanatory format with sufficient visual aids in the form of screenshots so that it is easy to follow even for those of you who are not very technical. As the author of this book, I am certain that you will experience a learning that you can build upon later; you will find that this provides an apt landing platform from where you are equipped to take the plunge.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Saying Hello to IBM Bluemix, covers cloud computing and cloud service delivery models, and then lets us take a look at what Bluemix is. It also covers the different ways in which the platform is offered, along with an introduction to the IBM Bluemix public offering.

Chapter 2, Building and Deploying Your First Hello World Application on Bluemix, introduces you to application building on IBM Bluemix. You will learn how to build a simple application on Bluemix and deploy and run it.

Chapter 3, Extending an Application and Configuring for Continuous Delivery Using DevOps Services, teaches you how to extend existing applications on Bluemix to build additional functionality using some of the value-added services on Bluemix; this is illustrated along with a sample application.

Chapter 4, Leveraging On-Premise Software for Applications on Bluemix, demonstrates a very important aspect of modern application building environment, called hybrid cloud. We will see how on-premise or local software or applications can be leveraged to integrate with newer applications that are to be deployed on public cloud infrastructure.

Chapter 5, Scaling Applications in Bluemix, introduces you to application scaling. You will learn about the scaling options supported on Bluemix: manual and auto-scaling.

Chapter 6, Monitoring and Management in Bluemix, discusses the different services that can be used to monitor and manage applications. You will learn to work with the Monitoring and Analytics service for a web application deployed on Bluemix. Additionally, the chapter introduces readers to NewRelic, which is a third-party service on Bluemix.

Chapter 7, Compute Options on Bluemix, covers the different compute options available on Bluemix, such as containers, Cloud Foundry applications, virtual servers, and Open Whisk.

Chapter 8, Security Services on Bluemix, talks about the security services available on Bluemix and elaborates two of the available security services in Bluemix. You will learn how to offload the web application authentication functionality to the Single Sign On service on Bluemix.

Chapter 9, Microservices-based Application Development on Bluemix, talks about an architecture pattern for application development on the cloud, called the Microservices architecture pattern. You will also learn how to use Bluemix and services on Bluemix to build and deploy applications that employ the microservices architecture.

Chapter 10, Mobile Application Development on Bluemix, introduces you to services offered on Bluemix that are specifically for mobile application development. You will learn how to use some of these services to build a simple mobile catalog application.

What you need for this book

Here's what you require for this book:

Cloud Foundry CLI (the latest version available)

Eclipse IDE (v4.4 or later)

Who this book is for

This book is aimed at developers seeking to learn application development and deployment methods on IBM Bluemix. A basic knowledge of Java and Node.js is assumed.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "You will notice that the deployable artifact for your application is the  webApp.war