Blogging without the hosting
Using Compose’s MySQL service & IBM Bluemix to run your blog
MySQL is a hugely popular database. Not only is it the cornerstone of a massively-relied-on development stack (LAMP), but it also backs a huge amount of open source systems on alternative stacks.
All or nothing
The internet is full of blogs or, more precisely, full of people using blogging software to build other things, from image galleries to full shopping carts. They’re able to build all this stuff because of the prevalence of open source blogging software and because this software is highly extensible. Two such platform are Ghost and Wordpress, both of which have an active group of supporters, users and developers working on themes and extensions.
These two blogging applications have hosted solutions, where you rely on a company to manage and maintain everything on your behalf. But what happens when you need customisation or want to reduce costs by taking on some of the work? In most cases, the solution is to completely self-host your site, which means managing servers, software and databases. Most people want to avoid managing a full stack because it can be a real commitment in terms of time and effort, even if you are saving money. (There’s a reason these hosting companies exist, after all.)
Best of both worlds
But what if you could have the flexibility of self-hosting the applications, but rely on tested providers to manage the infrastructure availability and database operations on your behalf? Well, you can. Here at IBM Watson Data Platform, we’ve produced a simple one-click install that takes advantage of IBM Bluemix to host the application environment and manage its uptime, and use Compose for MySQL to maintain the database.
Recently Compose released its MySQL-as-a-service offering, and it’s also available as part of the IBM Bluemix catalog. If you’re familiar with Compose and know they already ran managed services for MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis and many other open source DBs — you might be wondering why they just now got around to offering MySQL. Dj has the details on the Compose blog, but the tl;dr is that the advent of MySQL InnoDB Cluster delivered the high-availability features required to run on Compose’s platform.
To deploy either these blogging platforms to Bluemix, head to either the ghost-on-bluemix GitHub repo or the wordpress-on-bluemix GitHub repo and follow the instructions in the README. Happy blogging!
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