IBM Bluemix Mobile Cloud Services

The Mobile Cloud Services offering of IBM Bluemix (R) is a platform for cloud-based mobile applications, providing data and file storage, application authentication, push notifications, and server-side application logic, all available through easy-to-use client software development kits (SDKs). In this paper, we describe the server-side architecture for the key components of the Mobile Cloud Services. For scalability and fault resilience, components are implemented as stateless services that communicate using a distributed message queue. We adopted a "design for failure" approach to all environmental services, including basic networking support. We developed a robust communications layer that adds timeout and retry logic to all external interactions. We also built a flexible and robust application-monitoring infrastructure to constantly probe the service components, test end-to-end functionality, and report any problems through web monitors and text messages. Finally, we designed and delivered client SDKs for Android (R), iOS (R), and JavaScript (R) that enable application developers to quickly create robust mobile applications that utilize IBM Mobile Cloud Services. These architecture and implementation choices have resulted in a robust and scalable cloud-based platform for mobile application developers.