IBM is making its Bluemix cloud more appealing to developers by adding three services.
The SoftLayer-based platform-as-a-Service offering has added new services which it says will help to simplify and speed up app development in the cloud, partly by allowing developers to access and construct preconfigured toolchains using things like GitHub and Slack.
The addition of Continious Delivery is aimed at providing a central hub where DevOps teams can create, manage, and scale toolchains, which is an integrated set of tools that support app development, deployment and operations tasks.
The Delivery Pipeline services is capable of automating builds, tests and deployements and can detect issues before applications go live, and the new service also provides toolchain templates that can be provisioned enterprise-wide.
Templates will now include toolchains that will make it easier to build microservices, containers, or cloud-native applications with integrations to the likes of GitHub, Slack, PagerDuty and Sauce Labs.
Continuous Delivery is also tapping into Big Blue’s Availability Monitoring service, which is designed to help ensure that applications are both available and meeting user expectations as updates are rolled out by developers.
The service runs simulated user tests from around the world, 24/7, in order to help detect problems in web applications and REST architecture APIs, the company said.
Dave Lindquist, IBM Fellow and VP of Development, IBM Cloud DevOps and Analytics, said: “One of the biggest challenges developers face in today’s cloud-led world is efficiently building and deploying applications to stay competitive.
“With the introduction of Bluemix Continuous Delivery, developers can not only create, integrate and share DevOps toolchains using their favorite tools, but also add optional pay-as-you-go powerful services like cognitive computing with Watson or data and analytics services from The Weather Company.”
In essence, the additions of Continuous Delivery, Availability Monitoring and the Delivery Pipeline, should make it easier to scale DevOps toolchains and help to ensure more consistency.