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Getting started with IBM’s Bluemix

For Global Entrepreneurs,

A QUICK START GUIDE TO BLUEMIX DEVELOPMENT FOR ENTREPRENEURS, START-UPS AND THE DEVELOPERS THAT LOVE THEM.

Luke Schantz, IBM Corp 2016

If you are reading this I am assuming you are in the IBM Global Entrepreneur programs and already have a Bluemix account. If by chance you are reading this have not applied to the Global Entrepreneur programs please do so at: https://developer.ibm.com/startups/ If you do not qualify as a startup; Have no fear. There are still plenty of ways to dig in and see what IBM tech can do for you. Head on over to developerWorks and see what is shaking. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/

Getting Started with Bluemix, v.001 April 22, 16

Welcome to the Global Entrepreneur program. We are a community focused team, helping entrepreneurs solve problems and succeed through technical and business mentorship, as well as, by providing

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hosting credits for SoftLayer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the Bluemix Platform as a Service (PaaS). My name is IBM Bee and I will be your guide to the getting started with Bluemix.

You have $1,000 a month in credit for use with Bluemix. Your account was created on April 22, 2016 and your graduation date for the program is April 22, 2017.

The 40,000 foot overview.

Bluemix is IBM’s flexible platform as a service (PaaS). It is a managed implementation of the open source PaaS Cloud Foundry. It can be used for the development and deployment of web and mobile applications, as well as, provide an access point to a wide variety of managed services and APIs.

Most notable of the services and APIs are the cognitive computing functionality of the IBM Watson APIs. Many people remember Watson’s A.I. fueled victory, over human beings on the Jeopardy game show in 2011. Well now the same technologies are accessible as APIs and can give your application powerful predictive, analytic and machine learning capabilities. In a simple terms, Bluemix allows you to get developing quickly and expedites the production of scalable web and mobile applications with access to many powerful services and APIs. Any of these services can be bound to your applications without further authentication or fuss. This allows you to very quickly try out many different types of services with out having to install and maintain the

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technology. In this sense, even those who want to manage their own infrastructure and not use a PaaS, may find value in using Bluemix for evaluation and testing of technologies and solutions within the ecosystem. Meanwhile, many of the managed services, such as databases can be accesses by 3rd party hosts or users through standard Open Authentication. Bluemix plays nicely with your current development workflow. The entire platform can be controlled from the command line. There are also command line tools for pushing from your development machine to the Cloud Foundry platform. Or if you prefer, your Github commits can be configured to automatically deploy to Bluemix.

For those who are looking for a complete DevOps solution; Bluemix seamlessly integrates with IBM’s DevOps application JazzHub which boasts 1. git versioning, 2. a code editor, 3. project planning and tracking 4. a customizable multi-stage build and deploy module.

Summation In this short introduction we have only hinted at what is possible with Bluemix. It could be used to host your start-ups entire application in multiple data centers with a global reach or to make a single API call for your weekend IoT project or company hackathon. Really Bluemix is just a portal to IBM and it’s really wonderful technology and all the cool things your cloud can be.

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Prerequisites and Purpose The goal of this document is to get Bluemix integrated into your workflow as quickly and painlessly as possible. In order to achieve this, we are going to do three things. (1) Firstly, we are going to take a speedy tour of Bluemix. (2) Then we are going to very quickly get a node.js boilerplate application running on your account. (3) And finally, we are going to provide a few options for incorporating Bluemix into your workflow of choice. For the sake of facilitating a smooth start to your Bluemix development, I suggest you continue with this document when you are at your computer and ready to follow along. Ideally, you should work through this document once from beginning to end, following the along and then you should be at a good starting point to start developing and deploying applications on Bluemix or using Bluemix services in your hybrid could applications. If you want to approach this someother way. Feel free to do so but this document is designed to be setting up and configuring your Bluemix environment during the tour and boiler plate portion. So that when you get to the third section of integrating it with your workflow; all the bits and bobs you need should already be good to proverbially go.

(1) A Quick Tour of Bluemix

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Firstly you need to log into your Bluemix account. Please refer to the email you received with your log in credentials. Login to your account at http://bluemix.net. You should be forwarded to the Bluemix console at: https://console.ng.bluemix.net Upon logging in please make sure you are looking at your Dashboard.

It is possible to be logged into Bluemix and not be looking at your dashboard. So if by chance your console doesn’t look like this. Try clicking the dashboard link indicated by the red arrow above. Please note that Bluemix is a responsive application and if your browser window is narrow or you are on a mobile device you may see these options under the left most menu as depicted in the graphic below.

Now that you are logged in and looking at your dashboard; Let’s review some important concepts and components as we continue our quick tour of Bluemix.

Concept 1 – The Bluemix organizational hierarchy.

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Regions, Organizations & Spaces

Regions: Refers to the data center that the Bluemix instance is running in. Currently there are three available regions; US South, United Kingdom and Sydney. If you click on your user account on the far right top corner of your dashboard; you can see your current region.

Organization: Every organization has users. You can be part of one or more organizations. Organizations have two types of members 1) Managers and 2) Users.

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Space: A user can be part of multiple spaces that span different regions and organizations. A space is the container that can each hold multiple Cloud Foundry applications. Try creating a space by clicking where the green arrow indicates to do so in the graphic above.

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Concept 2 – The components of Bluemix Bluemix is sometimes hard to define because it is so chock full of cloud goodness. It can be so many things to so many different types of projects. A good way to think of it is as a gateway to all things IBM cloud and more. Bluemix components can be:

• Cloud Foundry Apps • Containers • Virtual Servers • Data & Analytics • Services & APIs

We are going to do a deep dive into the Cloud Foundry Apps in section (2). To finish up our tour in (1) we are going to look at the Services and APIs. Services and APIs are organized in the following categories: Watson Mobile DevOps Web and Application Network Integration Data & Analytics Security Storage Business Analytics Internet of Things APIs Bonus: Bluemix Labs There are too many services and APIs on the Bluemix platform to even begin to address their individual specific attributes in this document. I have mearly

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included them here just so you are introduced to them as a collection and have a general idea of how they are organized and where to find them. From the Bluemix Dashboard click on the button that says

You will be brought to the services page. Please scroll to view all the catalog. I suggest that you just scroll through this page and take get an idea of what is available. When your done. Let’s move onto section (2) the Boilerplate Application on page 15 of this document.

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(2) Boiler Plate Application Cloud Foundry Apps

Could Foundry is a middle ware platform that is comparable to Heroku, Microsoft Azure, Open Shift or Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. Cloud Foundry is open source and supports a wide variety of programing languages.

You will then be taken to the menu of boilerplate applications.

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For our purposes here today we are going to select the Node Red boilerplate. Although please take note of what you see here. If one of these languages is part of your stack, you may want to revisit another boilerplate as a starting point for your development.

After selecting the node red menu option you will be taken to the application-provisioning menu.

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Above is provisioning menu with the JavaScript Cloud Foundry application selected. Below the Cloudant instance is selected.

You will notice that our application is made up of a JavaScript Cloud Foundry application and a Cloudant NoSQL database (Cloudant is managed CouchDB). You now need to pick a name for the application. I have called my demo application: AppyMcAppFace. Please feel free to call your application what ever you like. Although AppyMcAppFace has already been taken.

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Click the Create button in the lower part of the right panel.

You will see some notifications appear briefly in the top right of your application showing the status of your application (starting or stopping for instance).

At this point Bluemix will prompt you to install the Cloud Foundry command line tools. Resist the urge to comply with it’s prompting. I am serious. Don’t install them right now.

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For our purposes today we are going to do something else instead. We will dig into those command line tool options in section (3). For right now we want to make sure your DevOps workflow is setup and you have all the options enabled and configured for section 3. Please return to the Dashboard by either clicking on the arrow button in the upper left corner of the frame

Back on the Dashboard you will see your Node Red boiler plate application listed under the application heading with the name you gave it while provisioning.

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Click on that application tile and you will be brought to that applications control portal page.

Click the link in the upper right hand corner of the page that says “ADD GIT”

At this point you will be prompted to either create a IBM DevOps service associated with your account or if you have already created that IBM DevOps service account you will be prompted to choose if you want to populate the repository with the boiler plate currently running on your Cloud Foundry instance. Make sure the check box to Populate the app is selected and click continue.

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The panel will change to a Success message when the process is complete. Close this panel with the close button below.

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Returning to the application page and you will see a new link at the top right corner of the application page. The link will start with http://hub.jazz.net/ Click this link and you will be taken to the IBM DevOps control panel.

On this page of the application you can see the files of your Cloud Foundry application. Please take note of the Edit Code, Track & Plan and Build & Deploy buttons in the top right of the page. You may want to come back and check this out.

We are not going to dig any deeper here right now as we are going to move to the IBM DevOps Dashboard.

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