Review: IBM Bluemix bulks up Cloud Foundry

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The one business analytics service in Bluemix is Embeddable Reporting, which lets you run IBM Cognos Business Intelligence reports within your Bluemix environment. The business analytics service runs against supported JDBC data source connections.

In the security area, Bluemix offers AppScan for Web, AppScan for Android, and SSO (single sign-on). The SSO service combines BYO social IDs, IBM IDs, and multifactor authentication.

Bluemix at your service

That’s a lot of Bluemix services. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, many of them are still experimental, in beta, or have restrictions that make them inappropriate for most production apps. The Watson services, potentially the biggest differentiator of Bluemix versus other Cloud Foundry implementations, are all beta, and mostly restricted to limited domains.

Fortunately, the remaining services tend to be very robust. I wouldn’t hesitate to build a Web or mobile project on Bluemix, whether it was a green field app for a startup or a brown field app for an enterprise that needed to integrate legacy servers and systems of record.

I would, however, take a hard look at the security and regulatory requirements of the app. Bluemix can handle EU geographical data requirements, as it has a data center in London. It may eventually be certified for compliance with FIPS, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS at the data center level; right now it’s at an early stage of those processes.

I scored Bluemix higher than Cloud Foundry because of the way it has filled in the gaps in the open source Cloud Foundry implementation. Management, installation, and setup are better because Bluemix does all the heavy lifting internally. I scored documentation the same for both products; Bluemix is a little better documented, but only a partial point worth, and we use integer scores.

I scored both Bluemix and Cloud Foundry (emphasizing the Pivotal implementations) a 9 for value, but for somewhat different reasons. Essentially, the Bluemix value proposition is that you can start for free, run small for free, and pay as you go as you scale out. It looks to me like the free Bluemix runtime allotments are generous enough to get most people started without a lot of friction. Presumably, by the time your app has blown through the limits of the free tiers, you’ll have a good idea of the return on investment on your app, and you can either justify the cost or pull the plug.

This story, "Review: IBM Bluemix bulks up Cloud Foundry" was originally published by InfoWorld.