Building scalable, secure, multi-tenant cloud services on IBM Bluemix

Abstract

While an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud provides an economic alternative to managing information technology on premises, it does not provide ready-to-use advanced functionalities for solution management. A platform-as-a-service cloud (PaaS), on the other hand, provides application management and offers a catalog of services, which developers can easily use to host their solutions in the cloud. It also provides DevOps capabilities, which facilitate the management of a solution lifecycle. In this paper, we offer insights into the benefits and challenges that developers, who want to develop applications or offer services, would face in using a PaaS. We describe the step-by-step process of developing applications and offering services on IBM Bluemix, which is a PaaS cloud. We identify the key ingredients to achieve service scalability, security, and multi-tenancy. We also demonstrate the entire process through case studies of two Bluemix services: Rating-as-a-Service (RaaS) and the beta release of the Workflow Service .