Is anyone using IBM Bluemix for their meteor app hosting? If so would like to get feedback?
Thanks,
Almog
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I’ve started to try it. It looks good. Deployment is done via a Cloud Foundry command:
cf push appname -b https://github.com/ind1go/bluemix-buildpack-meteor.git
You can use it for free indefinitely if your account stays within the limits:
Monthly Free Tier
365 GB-Hours of Memory
2 Public IP Address
20 GB External Storage
They also offer a free 250 MB MongoDB database, though it’s flagged as experimental at the moment. It’s working so far in my testing.
They have 3 data centre locations:
US South
Sydney
United Kingdom
It seemed that HTTPS was required for there to be no problems with websockets. HTTPS is on by default if you don’t use your own custom domain name and leave it at appname.mybluemix.net. But if you want to use your own domain name you need to install your own SSL certificate. SSL certificate installation was very easy via their web interface.
For encrypted connection to work for a custom domain, your domain’s DNS A record needs to be 75.126.81.68.
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Does it allow you to monitor how stressed your instance(s) is, and allow you to easily add containers to scale up? (like Galaxy)
I’ve test-driven it and yes this is possible.
I chose not to use it yet for the simple reason that doing coordinated version updates using active deploy is not as seamless as I’d hoped (after an update the websocket connection doesn’t get updated automatically to the new servers, so you need a refresh to get the latest version or shutdown the old version servers, will have to look into it further for possible solutions).
Also deployments do take a little long (which is not a problem for production servers, but was testing it for staging purposes, which require as fast a deployment time as possible for me personally). I haven’t tested galaxy yet, so can’t really use deployment time as an argument for/against, but mup at this stage is quite a bit faster to do quick deployments.
Overall it looks like a great service with a vast ecosystem of internal and external services. If there were a solution for the small active deploy issue it would be a direct galaxy contender with pretty much exactly the same feature-set and I’d definitely use it for smaller low-traffic apps.
Hi,
Thanks for the info. I have just registered and received a conformation mail, stating: “Trial Subscription Duration (30 days)”, so are you sure it may be used indefinitely ?
The trial allows you test test things above the free limits for 30 days.
The Pricing page states:
every month you get a free allowance of container memory, public IP addresses, and external storage. Anything you use beyond this is charged at pay-as-you-go rates.
Will I have to provide a credit card?
After 30 days, you must provide a credit card to continue using Bluemix.
However, you can still use free monthly runtime and container allowances and free service plans. You will not be charged unless you exceed your free allowances.
Clear now, thanks. They could have made it more clear in their conf letter, so I would not bother you