Bluemix London Now Live!

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We’ve got not just one, but two big announcements for you in today’s blog:

• With the introduction of Bluemix London, the original U.S.-hosted Bluemix has a European twin! This means you can exploit the power of Bluemix to deploy apps that run in the United Kingdom or the United States. With your existing account, you can easily choose to work with either region from both the Bluemix UI or the cf command line.
• As an alternative to our two public deployments, we’re also introducing Bluemix Dedicated. This is a private Bluemix environment managed and hosted by IBM. By letting us do the heavy lifting, your development team is freed up to build apps rather than maintain hardware and software installations.

Keep reading for more information on both of these exciting offerings.

Multiregion Bluemix

Overview

Whether targeting the UK or U.S., the same Bluemix management infrastructure for apps and services runs in each region. So, there is now a UK-hosted Bluemix UI and a U.S.-hosted Bluemix UI.

You might choose one region or the other for a variety of reasons. For example, to decrease application latency, you might select the region closest to the majority of your users. As another example, you may prefer to have your data stored in a particular region to address security concerns. Finally, you might deploy an app to both regions so if one region has failures, the apps in the other region will continue to run.

For more conceptual info about regions, see the Regions topic in the Bluemix docs.

UI Updates

With multiple regions enabled, you’ll notice a few changes in the Bluemix UI:

• Region selector — The banner in the Bluemix UI now shows you which region you’re working in and provides a pulldown menu that allows you to choose a different region.
• Usage by region — Usage for both regions is combined into a single view for billing. Your resource allowance is the same for each region that you use.
• Global organizations and regional spaces — An organization created in one region is available in all of the other regions, but spaces are only available in the region they were created in. If you switch regions and then choose an org without any spaces, you will be prompted to create one. Just enter a name for the new space and click Create.

Bluemix Dedicated

Perhaps you really like what Bluemix has to offer, but your enterprise would feel more comfortable with a private platform for development. That’s where the new Bluemix Dedicated offering comes to the rescue. We manage and host it, so you can spend more time writing code. All dedicated deployments include the following:

• Networking — VPN, Private VLAN, Firewall
• Integration — Connectivity with your LDAP, leverage existing on-premises databases and applications
• Security and Compliance — 24/7 on-site security, dedicated hardware
• Blue glove support — IBM Bluemix technical experts, integrated ticketing system, available 24/7/365

For more details, see the post Bluemix Dedicated and Enterprise Cloud Platforms, or contact the Bluemix sales team

What’s Next?

We hope you’ll try out the UK region and give us a call if you’re interested in Bluemix Dedicated. Your feedback is very important. If you have questions or other comments, please let us know on the Bluemix Dev-to-Dev Community or tweet us at @IBMBluemix. And, if you want to talk to Bluemix developers in person, check out one of the local Bluemix meetups in your area or look for us at a conference.

Finally, remember if you don’t already have an account, you can simply go to www.bluemix.net and get free instant access to a 30-day trial without a credit card!