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.

Cloud Foundry has been fundamental in our initial cloud solution development, hanging over a Bluemix solution to provide the gateway / sandpit environment for our industry to quickly develop and push proof of concept pieces of work without the fear of having the normal business processes hanging over them and getting in the way with red tape. Although we are now going in the direction of more IBM managed services where the likes of IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Private and Multicloud Manager link better in those Kubernetes managed solutions, our time using Cloud Foundry is not over by a long shot and can/will seamlessly work with what will become our key tool stack. Both still have their place, with CF being the better option to keep things standardized, ring fenced and easy for the end user to consume, and then the links in to the K8s services allowing for wider customization.

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.

IBM Bluemix is being used as my primary cloud computing service, having recently replaced AWS as my preferred service. I work with an IT consulting firm, and specialize in designing IT infrastructure for businesses, usually start-ups. My company has changed over the years as technology changes, originally setting servers up at the clients location, then moving to hosting them myself, and now I utilize cloud services with IBM as my primary source of server environments since software development is the focus of 75% of the start-ups I have been encountering, which is where BlueMix shines. Instead of detailing out how I use these services, I am going to explain the differences between IAAS (AWS/Google/Azure) vs PAAS (BlueMix, Redhat). The main difference is what level of control the system focuses on, when it comes to IAAS, the system is focused on infrastructure, such as building a server with x processors, x amount of ram, a storage system with X Gb of data. PAAS on the other hand, is focused on the whole platform that will run your software rather than just the simulated hardware specifications. AWS (IAAS) lets me build a virtual server with 2 processors, 1 gb of ram, 15 Gb of drive space, and 2 network adapters, which I then need to install an OS on, BlueMix (PAAS) lets me setup a geographically clustered environment that can serve HTML, PHP, and MySQL, while also being able to pull Microsoft SQL, while running a version tracking system, such as GIT. So from the start, I specify what I need my system to do to run my software, rather than what I need my server to have to run my OS, to run my server software that I can add additional functionality to in order to allow my custom software to operate best