Introduction
IBM® Bluemix delivers quick and easy cloud capabilities to deploy and
maintain your web application, with minimal hassle and overhead.
The IBM Bluemix application architectures and accompanying walkthroughs
will allow you to confidently apply industry-adopted standard architecture
capabilities into your application deployments.
Overview
There are two main application included in IBM Blue Mix architectures.
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Web App Hosting
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Hybrid Data Storage
Web App Hosting
architecture
This paper describes vendor neutral best practices for hosting web
applications using cloud computing. The architectural elements described in the
document are needed to instantiate a web application hosting environment using
private, public or hybrid cloud deployment models.
At a high level, Web application hosting supports server applications
which deliver web pages containing static and dynamic content, over HTTP or
HTTPS. The static content is typically represented by "boilerplate
text" of a web page and more specialized content held in files such as
images, videos, sound clips and PDF documents. Dynamic content is typically
built in response to a specific request from the client, based on content in
the request and content derived from a database connected to the web
application.
The core component for hosting web applications is the Web Application
Server, but to produce a secure, reliable, high performance architecture a
number of other components are required, such as firewalls, load balancers,
databases, file repositories and content delivery networks. In addition,
lifecycle management, operations management, and governance need to be
considered for these components. How these functions are accomplished will
differ depending on where the components are deployed and how integration into
management systems is supported.
When the cloud service is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
offering, all the elements of the architecture will need to be individually
acquired or instantiated. In some cases, the IaaS cloud service provider is
able to offer some of the elements in a ready-to-run form.
For the case where the cloud service is a Platform as a Service (PaaS)
offering, it is often the case that many elements of the architecture are
available as part of the offering and only configuration and deployment is
required.
The cloud deployment model affects the locations of many of the
components. For Public cloud deployment, the elements are instantiated in the
public cloud. For Private cloud deployment, the components are instantiated
within the private cloud, either on-premises or within a privately managed
environment made available by a cloud service provider. For Hybrid cloud
deployment, there is an element of choice of where to locate each component,
either in a public cloud environment or on-premises, with the choice typically
governed by security and performance considerations.
Please refer to the CSCC Practical Guide to Cloud Computing and Security
for Cloud Computing: 10 Steps to Enure Success for a thorough discussion on
deployment and security considerations for cloud computing including recommendations
on how best to address specific requirements.
Deploy cloud-native web apps with minimal hassle and overhead using
Bluemix. Bluemix provides open runtimes, DevOps tools, and integrated services
to simplify the development, testing, and deployment of apps. Also,
Bluemix-hosted apps access a cloud infrastructure for the enterprise that is
scalable, powerful, available, and secure.
Components
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DNS Server – Domain Name System (DNS) Server
resolves the text URL for a particular web resource to the TCP-IP address of
the system or service which can deliver that resource to the client.
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Firewall – A Firewall is a system designed
to control communication access to or from a system - aiming to permit only
traffic meeting a set of policies to proceed and blocking any traffic which
does not meet the policies. Firewalls can be implemented as separate dedicated
hardware, or as a component in other networking hardware such as a
load-balancer or router or as integral software to an operating system.
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Load Balancer – Load Balancers distribute
network or application traffic across many resources (such as computers,
processors, storage, or network links) to maximize throughput, minimize
response time, increase capacity and increase reliability of applications. Load
balancers can balance loads locally and globally. Considerations should be made
to ensure that this component is highly available and is not a single point of
failure.
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Content Delivery Network (CDN) – Content
Delivery Networks are geographically distributed systems of servers deployed to
minimize the response time for serving resources to geographically distributed
users, ensuring that content is highly available and is provided to users with
minimum latency. Which servers are engaged will depend on server proximity to
the user, and where the content is stored or cached.
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Cache – Caches store information
temporarily needed to fulfill a request by the Web Application Server,
including session data and other content. The purpose of the cache is to reduce
the latency in responding to a request from a client.
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File Repository – File repositories are devices
or applications that store information, data, etc. in the form of files. Access
to the file repository generally includes the ability to store, retrieve,
delete and search the repository for a particular file. File repositories can
use network storage to provide access to shared files.
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Web Application Servers – Web
Application Servers offer web server functionality and integrated application
server functionality if it is needed. Web servers are systems that return
resources (web content and images for example) in response to an HTTP request
and may be configured to handle requests for multiple IP addresses and/or
domains. An integrated application server hosts the program logic used to
generate dynamic web content. This can involve retrieval of data from files,
databases, http-services, sensors, and other sources of data as well as
programmatic generation of new data or information. Web Application servers may
support clustering, pooling and other high availability and scaling
configurations including auto scaling – instantiating and removing application
server instances as demand requires.
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Web servers and application
servers can also be instantiated in a 3-tiered setup with separated rather than
integrated Web servers and application servers. In that case, there would be
separate pools of Web servers and application servers connected via load
balancers. The application server would be responsible for accessing databases
or other systems.
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User Directory – User Directory contains user
IDs and credentials needed to validate that the user is allowed to access the
information or applications being requested in the Web servers and application
servers. The directory can be accessed by web servers, applications servers,
databases or any other elements used in the web application.
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Database – Databases are structured sets of
data. Typically databases are kept on storage devices connected to computers
and/or networks. Replicated databases are a strategy for highly available and
reliable systems where data is copied frequently between 2 or more databases,
eliminating bottlenecks and single points of failure.
Hybrid Data Storage
architecture
Bluemix provides data storage and integration services to develop and
deploy hybrid IT architectures — with components in both cloud and non-cloud
environments. Enabling secure connectivity among apps and data sources
on-premises or in the cloud, Bluemix-hosted apps have access to cloud
infrastructure that supports enterprise requirements such as scalability,
performance, availability, and security.
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Bluemix services Start developing your web app
with compute technologies – Cloud Foundry, IBM Containers, or OpenStack Virtual
Machines. Building your app on these provides direct access to the robust
library of Bluemix services.
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Continuous Delivery Pipeline automates the building,
testing, and deployment of apps from your source-code repository to Bluemix.
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Auto-Scaling automatically increases or
decreases the available compute capacity of apps based on your custom policies.
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SQL Database - Bluemix provides a variety of
data services, specific to your app needs. The SQL Database provides a
provisioned, relational database to handle your demanding transactional
workloads.
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Cloudant NoSQL Database runs as an operational
data store, optimized to handle the high number of concurrent activities
required by today's cloud-native apps.
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Single Sign On provides policy-based
authentication services to Node.js or Liberty for Java apps, allowing users to
sign in through popular social sites or custom user registries.
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Data Cache offers in-memory storage to
increase the performance and scalability of apps, while lowering overall
latency.
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Object Storage, built on OpenStack Swift,
provides access to a distributed, highly-available managed object storage that
can be integrated directly into apps.
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Monitoring and Analytics provides
instant visibility and transparency into performance and health without the
need to learn or deploy other tools.
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Secure Gateway Service brings Hybrid Integration
capability to your Bluemix environment. A remote client is provided to enable
secure connectivity.
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