Chapter 4. Leveraging On-Premise Software for Applications on Bluemix

In this chapter, we will learn about the services on Bluemix that allow a hybrid cloud application development platform. We will learn, with an example, about how to use one of the integration services on Bluemix to connect to an application or enterprise software that is running locally on your desktop. In other words, these services are what allows for connectivity to enterprise on-premise software from the public cloud environment.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Creating an application on Bluemix

• Adding Watson services to the application

• Installing and configuring an on-premise database

• Creating the Secure Gateway service

• Configuring the Secure Gateway service:

  • Adding Gateway

  • Adding Destination

  • Installing the Secure Gateway client

• Updating the application to use the on-premise database

• Seeing it all working together

Services under the Integrate category

Bluemix provides a set of services under the category of Integrate. These services provide the functionality to securely connect from applications on cloud to applications residing in a trusted or secure environment. To view the set of services available, follow these steps:

1. Go to the welcome page, as shown in the following screenshot, and click Integrate:

   

2. Click the icon highlighted in the following screenshot to go to the catalog of services under the Integrate category:

   

3. The services available on Bluemix, which provide the function of integrating cloud and enterprise on-premise resources, are shown in the following screenshot:

   

   Note

   The services shown in the preceding screenshot are those that are available at the time of writing this book.

Let us next learn how to create an application that will use an on-premise resource, such as a database, and how we can use one of the integration services on Bluemix to help achieve this. In the process of this illustration...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to build an application that leverages on-premise resources. We learned how to use the Secure Gateway integration service to achieve the secure connectivity to the on-premise MongoDB database from your application hosted on Bluemix, which is a public cloud. In this way, we saw how Bluemix provides a hybrid cloud application development environment.

In the following chapter, we will learn how to scale the applications deployed on Bluemix manually, or by using the related DevOps services provided on Bluemix.