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SoftLayer, Bluemix and OpenStack: A Powerful Combination

Building and deploying applications on SoftLayer with Bluemix, IBM’s Platform as a Service (PaaS), just got a whole lot more powerful. At IBM’s Interconnect, we announced a beta service for deploying OpenStack-based virtual servers within Bluemix. Obviously, the new service is exciting because it brings together the scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure from SoftLayer with the open, standards-based cloud management platform of OpenStack. But making the new service available via Bluemix presents a particularly unique set of opportunities.

Now Bluemix developers can deploy OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer or their own private OpenStack cloud in a consistent, developer-friendly manner. Without changing your code, your configuration, or your deployment method, you can launch your application to a local OpenStack cloud on your premises, a private OpenStack cloud you have deployed on SoftLayer bare metal servers, or to SoftLayer virtual servers within Bluemix. For instance, you could instantly fire up a few OpenStack-based virtual servers on SoftLayer to test out your new application. After you have impressed your clients and fully tested everything, you could deploy that application to a local OpenStack cloud in your own data center ̶all from within Bluemix. With Bluemix providing the ability to deploy applications across cloud deployment models, developers can create an infrastructure configuration once and deploy consistently, regardless of the stage of their application development life cycle.

 

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/softlayer-bluemix-and-openstack-powerful-combination

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SoftLayer and Koding join forces to power a Global Virtual Hackathon

Koding is excited to partner with SoftLayer on its upcoming Global Virtual Hackathon, happening December 12–13, 2015. The event builds on last year’s Hackathon, where more than 60,000 developers participated from all over the world. The winners took home over $35,000 in prizes! This year, we’ve upped the ante to make the event even larger than the last time: the winner will take home a $100,000 grand prize.

“We are working with Koding for this virtual hackathon as part of our commitment to promote open source technology and support the talented community of developers who are dispersed all over the globe,” said Sandy Carter, general manager of Cloud Ecosystem and Developers at IBM. “Cloud-based open source development platforms like Koding make it easier to get software projects started, and hackathons are a great place to show how these kinds of platforms make software development easier and more fun.”

Why a virtual hackathon?
Hackathons are awesome. They allow developers to solve problems in a very short amount of time. The challenge with traditional hackathons is that they require you to be physically present in a room. With more and more of our lives moving online, why be tied to a physical location to solve problems? Virtual hackathons allow talented individuals from all over the world to participate, collaborate, and showcase their skills, regardless of their physical location. Our Global Virtual Hackathon levels the playing field.

Who won last year?
Educational games, especially those that teach programming, were popular to build—and a few actually won! Want to see what the winners built? Click here to check out a fun yet effective game teaching students to program. Learn more about the team of developers and see their code here. Last year, nine winners across three categories took home a prize. To see a list of last year’s winners, see the blog post here.

Tips to be successful and win this year
Here’s some motivation for you: the grand prize is $100,000. (That’s seed capital for your startup idea!)

So how do you win? First and foremost, apply now! Then talk to some friends and maybe even team up. You can also use Koding to find teammates once you’re accepted. Teammates aren’t a requirement but can definitely make for a fun experience and improve your chances of making something amazing.

Once you’re in, get excited! And be sure to start thinking about what you want to build around this year’s themes.

Source: http://blog.softlayer.com/2015/softlayer-and-koding-join-forces-power-global-virtual-hackathon

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Adventures in Bluemix: Migrating to MQ Light

One of my pet projects at SoftLayer is looking at a small collection of fancy scripts that scan through all registered Internet domain names to see how many of them are hosted on SoftLayer’s infrastructure. There are a lot of fun little challenges involved, but one of the biggest challenges is managing the distribution of work so that this scan doesn’t take all year. Queuing services are great for task distribution, and for my initial implementation I decided to give running a RabbitMQ instance a try, since at the time it was the only queuing service I was familiar with. Overall, it took me about a week and one beefy server to go from “I need a queue,” to “I have a queue that is actually doing what I need it to.”

While what I had set up worked, looking back, there is a lot about RabbitMQ that I didn’t really have the time to figure out properly. Around the time I finished the first run of this project, Bluemix announcedthat its MQLight service would allow connections from non-Bluemix resources. So when I got some free time, I decided to move the project to a Bluemix-hosted MQ Light queue, and take some notes on how the migration went.

Project overview

To better understand how much work was involved, let me quickly explain how the whole “scanning through every registered domain for SoftLayer hosted domains” thing works.

There are three main moving parts in the project:

  1. The Parser, which is responsible for reading through zone files (which are obtained from the various registrars), filtering out duplicates, and putting nicely formatted domains into a queue.
  2. The Resolver, which is responsible from taking the nicely formatted domains from queue #1, looking up the domain’s IP address, and putting the result into queue #2.
  3. The Checker, which takes the domains from queue #2, checks to see if the domains’ IPs belong to SoftLayer or not, and saves the result in a database.

Source : http://blog.softlayer.com/bluemix-migrating-mqlight