Book excerpt: This IBM® RedpaperTM publication gives readers a broad understanding of IBM BluemixTM cloud application development platform capabilities. Providing a platform as a service (PaaS) environment as one of its run times, along with containers and virtual machines, Bluemix uses the Cloud Foundry project as one of its open source technologies to accelerate new application development and DevOps methods. It provides optimized and flexible workloads, enables continuous availability, and simplifies delivery and manageability of an application by providing prebuilt services and hosting capabilities. The paper reviews the Bluemix architecture, explains how it works, describes key concepts and components, and provides an overview of Bluemix security. It also covers the various Bluemix service categories and the services within each category. This information will help anyone who is interested in exploring the potential and capabilities of Bluemix and its services.