Web Application hosting in IBM BlueMix

When it comes to Web Application hosting, IBM offers the most comprehensive options to build a scalable, highly available, secure and highly performing applications. The components of a Web Application are shown the architecture below.

1. DNS Service : Use DNS service to register and provide name service. IBM BlueMix provide a highly available primary and secondary name server.
2. Load Balancers : Load balancers are required to distribute the traffic among the servers and maintain high availability. Load Balancing is required either with in the data center and between the data center and depending on the architecture the customer can opt for shared local or dedicated local balancer and Citrix Netscaler VPX. The billing is based on the no of VIPs the load balancer is handling.
3. Web Servers : The are typically the Virtual Machines with a configured auto-scaling, which the customers can define on variety of factors like, resource utilization, bandwidth utilization etc. Customers have an option of billing hourly or monthly. Each server comes a download bandwidth quota of 250GB which can be pooled. So if you have 10 servers and our which only 2 servers are in presentation layer, and remaining are running the application logic then you have an option of pooling the bandwidht and getting up to 2.5TB of free bandwidth everymonth. And this a huge cost saving for the customers.
4. Database Servers: Database servers come in two options, Fully Managed and Unmanaged. IBM BlueMix provides many open sources databases as a fully managed offerings which takes the burden of management, security and high availability away from the customers. For unmanaged databases which are managed by the customers, IBM gives two deployment options to the customers. Bare Metal and Virtual Machine. A bare metal server gives better performance as compared to virtual servers. Furthermore it comes with 500 GB of bandwidth which again can be pooled with the servers to increase the free bandwidth usage.
5. Firewalls: IBM BlueMix offer software firewalls, hardware firewalls, dedicated hardware firewalls, Fortigate Security Appliance and Vyatta gateway. It completely depends on the customers and their requirement to opt for a better fit for their use case.
6. Storage: It's important to note that, decision of storage depends on many factors like which includes, what type of files need to be stored, what is the application, how much the data will grow over the period of time, what will be the data access pattern. Depending on the requirement you can either Block Storage, File Storage and Object Storage.
7. CDN : To speed the content distribution, IBM has tied up with Verizon to deliver high speed content across the globe. The CDN can be integrated with the Object Storage for the faster retrieval of data. And when it comes to video streaming, IBM's Streaming Manager ensures distribution of video faster with the collaboration of 5 CDN partners.

Overall, IBM BlueMix provides the most comprehensive portfolio to host web application. In case you are planning any web application project, you can reach out to me here