And the future of these activities is, you guessed it: in the Cloud :). It looks like not only the applications are moving to the Cloud, but also the development and deployment activities.
IBM is already working on an array of tools in this area, aimed at covering the development, collaboration and deployment of software and applications. The codename is BlueMix (www.ibm.com/bluemix) and it will make it much easier to deploy your code in the Cloud. It also has tight integration with JazzHub for the development life cycle, including software development processes.
BlueMix will offer features such as Application Compositions Environments for creation and mgmt of services, Runtimes and Frameworks support, Middleware Services. Operational and Application services.
More specifically, some features are listed below:
- Runtimes such as Liberty, Node.js, Ruby;
- DevOps such as Monitoring and Analytics, Git Hosting, Deployment Automation, IDE of choice (even web based, in the same way MS offers Azure Visual Studio);
- Data Mgmt Services such as SQL & JSON databases, MapReduce;
- Mobile Services: Push, CloudCode, Mobile app mgmt
- Web application services such as Data & Session cache, elastic MQ, SSO, Log analysis and more.
In conclusion, with BlueMix in the Cloud you will be able to run your apps, develop through JazzHub integration, use provided APIs and Services to help jump start your development, use Cloud integration features to connect to on premises systems, or to other public and private Clouds, or expose your own API. Or use SaaS SDKs.
So why would we need BlueMix over the current Cloud development PaaS offerings, including application servers, databases webservers and so on?
-- Because it will make it much easier to connect to other applications to share, sync, and manage data through a common Data SDK, do API Integration (i.e. tap into SaaS), do Mobile app development through the provided support, setting up a productive development environment, do monitoring - or run the code on the runtime of your choice.
In conclusion, soon you will be able to do development, collaboration, reuse and connect to other services and use runtime environments of your choice - all in the Cloud. You will be able to focus more on building business applications thus shortening your time to market, and focus less on setting up your development, testing and production environments ;)
A new era is upon us: Welcome to the new IBM Cloud Development Platform!
