Land, Sea and Air: When IBM Bluemix Goes On The Move

Whether it’s in a tiny Swedish development drone no bigger than a slice of toast, or a lumbering garbage truck in the streets of Nairobi, Bluemix technology can be found on the move across the world. Check out these case studies:

What Bluemix Was

Bluemix was IBM’s cloud platform for developers. It was built on the open source Cloud Foundry project and ran on IBM’s SoftLayer infrastructure. Rather than renting bare servers and setting everything up themselves, developers could use ready-made services such as databases, analytics and Internet of Things tools, and focus on writing their own application.

That’s the common thread in the three examples below. In each one, the hard part was the device or the vehicle in the real world. The cloud platform’s job was to collect the data, process it and get the results to the people who needed them, without each team building that plumbing from scratch.

Crazyflie Drones

Malmö, Sweden-based Bitcraze has created a handheld drone called Crazyflie, which weighs 27 grams and is equipped with long-range radio. It’s open sourced and expandable – almost like an airborne Raspberry Pi.

The Bluemix cloud is used as part of the mechanism to pilot the drone, either through an app or a gaming controller, significantly reducing development time. “It really saved us a lot of work when we got started,” says Bitcraze co-founder and developer Marcus Eliasson.

Fixing Nairobi’s Roads

To monitor the Kenyan capital’s traffic and construction needs, city officials fitted their fleet of garbage trucks with specially adapted mobile devices that used acceleration, gyroscopic and location data. As the trucks make their rounds, the devices upload their data to the cloud.

Bluemix is then used to deliver the results of the analysis to officials, accessible on mobile and desktop. “For the first time, city officials have a clear understanding of where potholes and speed bumps are,” says Dr. Aisha Walcott-Bryant of IBM Research Africa.

The idea is a clever one. Garbage trucks already cover a city’s streets on a regular schedule, so turning them into roving sensors gives officials a steady picture of road conditions without sending out survey crews. IBM Research – Africa, where Walcott-Bryant works, was founded in 2013 and has facilities in Kenya and South Africa. Its research areas include transportation, water management, agriculture, health care and government.

Speedboat Racing

SilverHook designs high-speed racing watercraft reaching speeds of up to 200 mph. Pilots have access to real-time feedback about the race through IBM Watson Analytics and Bluemix was used to rapidly develop and deploy this infrastructure, cutting development time by 40 per cent.

Ian Taylor, CEO of Animation Research, which works with SilverHook, says that the speed boat’s pilot receives data in real time helping drivers make decisions on the fly.

From Bluemix to IBM Cloud

The Bluemix name didn’t last much longer. In October 2017, IBM announced it was bringing its cloud services together under the IBM Cloud brand, retiring both the Bluemix and SoftLayer names.

IBM’s cloud strategy also shifted toward hybrid cloud, where companies run work across their own data centres and several public clouds. The biggest step was IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat for about $34 billion, its largest ever, which it announced in October 2018 and completed in July 2019.

Where the Crazyflie Went Next

Bitcraze kept developing the Crazyflie. Its current model, the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless, is still an open source flying development platform that fits in the palm of a hand, now weighing 32 grams. Bitcraze describes it as ideal for education, research and swarming, and says it can be flown with a game pad, or scripted to fly on its own. It also adds Bluetooth LE alongside its long-range radio and can land on a dock to charge between flights.

The open, expandable design TechPortfolio compared to a Raspberry Pi has stayed at the heart of the product, with add-on “decks” for things like positioning systems.

What These Case Studies Show

All three projects are about getting data off a moving object and turning it into something useful quickly, whether that’s a drone’s controls, a road repair list or a racing pilot’s next decision. The common benefit the teams describe is time: less of it spent building infrastructure, and more spent on the thing that makes their project different.

For startups, that’s still the main argument for building on a cloud platform rather than running your own servers, whatever the platform is called today.