Swift in the Cloud

CHAPTER 4The IBM Bluemix Buildpack for Swift

Bluemix supports Cloud Foundry (http://docs.cloudfoundry.org), which is a popular open source Platform as a service (PaaS) for creating and deploying applications on the Cloud. Because of this, as a developer on Bluemix, you have access to artifacts and resources that are first-class citizens in the Cloud Foundry platform, such as buildpacks.

Buildpacks (http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/buildpacks/) provide the runtime required to execute your applications on the cloud when leveraging Cloud Foundry on Bluemix. Many Cloud Foundry buildpacks are available (including java_buildpack, ruby_buildpack, and nodejs_buildpack) on Bluemix. One of the new additions to the family of buildpacks on Bluemix is the IBM Bluemix buildpack for Swift. This buildpack allows developers to provision Swift applications on Bluemix that follow the structure and conventions required by Swift Package Manager (https://swift.org/package-manager). This is very exciting because it is now entirely feasible to implement back-end components and microservices in the Swift language that execute on the Bluemix cloud.

IBM provides and maintains this buildpack for Swift on Bluemix. This makes it possible for developers to implement and deploy many different types of Swift applications to Bluemix.

Cloud Foundry Buildpacks

A buildpack is a software artifact implemented in Ruby or Bash, which cloud administrators install into Cloud Foundry, which is one of the supported cloud ...