I've heard about Bluemix a few months back but only a few days ago after watching a couple YouTube movies about node-red running in Bluemix I decided to give it a try. There is a 30 day free trial after which payment for some services is required; however, there is a free allowance after the trial of 375 GB-hours free for each IBM-provided runtime and 375 GB-hours free for all other runtimes combined. According to the pricing page, 1 GB-hours = Total GB/App x Number of App Instances x Total Hours running so 375 free GB-hours per month basically means one app using up to 512 MB of RAM (or more apps with a total of 512 MB of RAM for all of them) running non-stop which is pretty cool.
Starting with the node-red boilerplate was a bit bumpy at first: the movies I watched showed different steps but the service appears to have been changed a little since then; currently the steps are: after login, click Create an app, select Web, click on Browse Sample Apps and then Explore Samples, choose Node-RED Starter and finally name your app and click Create. In the end though, creating my first app was easy, and using this boilerplate gives you the node.js SDK with node-red preinstalled along with 2 services: Monitoring and Analytics, free not just during the trial period but after that as well and Cloudant NoSQL DB which I believe has a free plan after the trial period, need to look into it if I decide to use it after trial. Also, this app comes with some pretty cool nodes, like ibmiot designed to connect the app with IBM's Internet of Things module, and others.
The coolest thing with this setup is that now I have a node-red app running in the cloud complete with access to the editor so my Raspberry Pi can take a break from running non-stop and no more need for port-forwarding to access my Raspberry Pi node-red from outside my home network. I tried doing the same thing using Weaved but without luck: I was able to use Weaved to connect to port 1880 and the node-red editor came up without issues, however saving flows didn't work, I guess the underlying code didn't like this setup. Another option to run node-red in the cloud is documented by Chris Mobberley on his awesome Hardware_Hacks blog that I never got to try. I assume running node-red in the cloud should be possible using Heroku for example, since Heroku is great for hosting node.js apps but again, never tried.
I have now a flow running non-stop in Bluemix (that I will go over in a future post) and all I can say is that I am very happy I gave Bluemix a try and I am sure I will continue using it beyond the free trial. If you haven't used it, it is definitely worth checking out. Big thanks to IBM for providing such a great service, to Nicholas O'Leary and Dave Conway-Jones and others who I believe are responsible for the node-red boilerplate and provide great support in the Bluemix forum, and also to everyone else that steered me to Bluemix through their videos and comments.
[Update] Since weaved released a new version recently, I decided to give it another try. I uninstalled the previous version 1.2.5 and installed the new 1.2.8 setting up a TCP service on port 1880 (node-red default editor port), connected to it and this time the flows saved and worked as expected. This is really awesome! Huge thanks to the Weaved team for all their great work!
