Free IBM Bluemix Developer Resources

First, I put a beautiful picture with a robot to attract attention, because we all love robots. But then I replaced it with this boring screenshot from the IBM Bluemix website , because we all love money. More precisely, we do not like to spend them. The screenshot is quite informative, but below I will write down the details a bit. So what does the developer get for free?

Those who know about Bluemix have heard of a 30-day free trial. But for some reason, not everyone went further and studied the tariffs in order to understand that after the trial is over, little changes for the average developer or owner of a small blog.

What does Bluemix have?

• PaaS built on the basis of CloudFoundry. The user writes the code and sends it to the cloud, which does the rest, including scaling
• Containers - Docker containers
  
• VMs - Openstack-Managed Virtual Machines
  
• Services - databases, analytics, mobile development, DevOps, Watson, etc.
  

Virtual machines are still in beta, access to them must be obtained separately and the pricing policy is not yet clear. To understand the rest we will learn a couple of terms.

Gigabyte-hour (GB-hour) - the amount of memory consumed by the application per hour, this is the main unit of computing resources in Bluemix. For example: CloudFoundry supports various development languages, a specific runtime (for example Python, Node.js) is called runtime.

Если приложение развернуто на одном инстансе, использует 1GB и работает 24 часа, то потребляемый объем 24 гигабайт-часов, если же оно было развернуто на 2-х инстансах, каждый из которых 12 часов использовал 1GB, а 12 часов - 512MB, то получаем 36 гигабайт-часов [2*(12*1 + 12*0.5)].




In PaaS, a user can have up to three runtimes for free (Liberty for Java, Node.js and one to choose from), each of which consumes no more than 375 gigabyte-hours per month, i.e. the free threshold is 512MB per hour. For example, you can run a Java application at the same time for free - 1 instance x 512MB, PHP application - 2 instances x 256MB and Node.js application - 8 instances of 64MB each. And this is provided that everything is done around the clock.

You can also run two docker containers, each given 365 gigabyte-hours for free, the kit includes 2 external IP and 20GB of external disk space. Those. in the simplest case, you can use two 512MB containers around the clock.

Each service has its own pricing policy, there are completely free, almost everyone has one free tariff, suitable for the development or operation of a small application.

You can see the cost in detail and evaluate your potential costs in the calculator .

As you can see, resources for developing your applications and launching existing ones for personal needs (a blog on Ghost , for example) are quite enough, register, use.

Yes, I also saved the picture with the robot.