IBM Cloud Foundry

IBM Cloud Foundry is one of the most powerful, highly scalable, and widely used platforms that not only offers IaaS and PaaS cloud services, but also helps us in building new apps or migrating old ones. It helps us in on-prem and off-prem deployments as well as bringing all of these elements together in the cloud for our ease and to help us solve real-world, difficult business challenges on this single platform effectively. IBM Cloud Foundry ensures that the build and deploy elements of coding are meticulously coordinated with any attached services, [ensuring] application iteration is swift, consistent, and dependable.

IBM Cloud Foundry is the primary container deployment technology we utilize for our cloud product offerings. All our cloud applications are deployed and running with it. IBM Cloud Foundry simplifies the processes for our development and operations team, by providing a standardized packaging and deployment methodology, as well as integrating into the overall toolchain, from development to final deployment.

At my work place, most of the in house web solutions and client projects we built is being hosted on IBM Cloud Foundry. Its being used majorly by Engineering team which I co-managed for the firm, and I also assist in tutoring new developer on how to make use of IBM Cloud foundry and other IBM Paas or resources that will make use by the Engineering team. It provide us flexibility in hosting, which there is option for continuous delivery which can be make use when you setup continuous delivery toolchain, which I have make use when I am given role to set up the environment for a new project and a starter content for the project. Secondly, make use of terminal command to push project to IBM Cloud foundry, which I can configure the custom domain which I want to assign to particular project through my terminal. Thirdly, I can allocate max memory which my application should make use of especially when we implement Proof of Concept to pitch our idea, so i reduce it from the default 256mb to 64mb which helps to save cost and waste of cloud resources, which other applications can make use of. Fourthly, there is provision for secure and non secure subdomain url for hosted application which is very good startup at-least when sharing our POC link, investor won't be worried since we would be providing with secure url to access our ideas which in return make them trust us and give us audience.

All the RESTful APIs and SPA applications are deployed to Cloud Foundry. We also use P2P security for the private services which is good and eliminates external security measures. CI/CD is much easier with CLI and infrastructure is of course not a big deal anymore.

IBM Cloud Foundry is the main repository of APIs for our organization. We are migrating some we have internally already developed in loopback and developing from scratch, and some others in other frameworks. For those already in loopback, we just check that we are taking advantage of all the new features in the cloud. For the rest, we started with a new basic ground API and start reusing most of it.
With this approach, we are increasing the API response time and availability and getting rid of local hardware.

I personally build tech demos to showcase emerging tech and try to encourage others to do so. IBM Bluemix was great for me to bring in APIs like The Weather Channel data and text to speech to create a virtual assistant. I wrote about it online to teach others how to do so too.