Chapter 3. Extending an Application and Configuring for Continuous Delivery Using DevOps Services

Ready to dive a little deeper into understanding the Bluemix platform? Yes? Great! Let us get started by looking at what you will get to learn in this chapter. In this chapter, you will learn how to compose an extensible application by using services from the Bluemix catalog; we will take you through this using a sample application. We will also learn what continuous delivery is and how would you should be configuring your application to achieve continuous delivery using the DevOps services provided on the Bluemix platform. You will also learn how to extend this application easily to incorporate more functional capabilities.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

• DevOps services and the delivery pipeline

• Configuring the delivery pipeline for your application

• Configuring continuous delivery for your application

• Extending the application

DevOps services and the delivery pipeline

The delivery pipeline is the mechanism for configuring continuous delivery in the agile application development and deployment lifecycle. The delivery pipeline is a service in the DevOps category. A suite of other services are also available under the DevOps category on Bluemix. The services available in this category at the time of writing this book is as shown in the following screenshot:

Configuring the delivery pipeline for your application

Before we look at how to configure the delivery pipeline, we will need to create an application that we will use for illustration. So let us get started by creating a starter application by using a boilerplate, as we did in the previous chapter. This time, we will use the Internet of Things boilerplate to create the starter application. We have chosen this boilerplate for few reasons, as follows:

• Understanding how to write applications that are wired and not coded

• Getting a feel for writing or wiring applications...

Extending the application

We will now look at how easy it is to extend your Node-RED application. To extend the application, we will use a Cloudant NoSQL DB node in flow, so that when the temperature exceeds the critical threshold, there is a database entry made in your configured Cloudant database.

Complete the following steps to extend this application:

1. Add a Cloudant NoSQL DB service instance using the procedure we have discussed in previous chapters to add any service instance on Bluemix.

2. Once the Cloudant NoSQL DB service instance is added to your Bluemix organization and space, you will see it listed in your dashboard, as shown in the following screenshot:

   

3. Go to your application route and go to the flow editor.

4. Drag and drop the cloudant node from under the storage category in the palette to your flow editor.

5. Remove the wiring of the template node named  danger to the debug node.

6. Wire the output node of  danger to connect to the cloudant input node.

7. Double-click on the cloudant node to configure...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to compose applications using the Node-RED editor, and how to deploy the application on Node.js runtime on Bluemix. Applications that can be composed, such as Node-RED applications, are easily extensible; the functionality of such applications can be extended by wiring additional nodes to the flow. We also looked at how to use the IBM DevOps services to configure a continuous delivery pipeline for your application. In this chapter, you also learned about how to create a Git repository for your application and how to use the web editor for working on your application source files.

In the next chapter, we will see how we can build applications on public Bluemix that leverage on-premises software.