To help organizations quickly develop cloud applications, IBM today released the Bluemix Garage Method, an online resource that provides best practices and tool chains for cloud application development.

Bluemix Garage Method is “a form of digital enablement,” said Rachel Reinitz, distinguished engineer and CTO of IBM Bluemix Garage. “It brings together a set of practices and information on tooling to help clients rapidly adopt cloud—providing our best practices about that adoption.“

Specifically, the Garage Method gives developers specialized tracks to help them build cloud-based applications faster and “more intelligently” with IBM’s advanced APIs.

The Garage Method was announced in October 2015 and has been available with four tracks:

• Accelerating innovation with cloud native
• Delivering a first-class mobile experience
• Migrating existing systems to the cloud
• Implementing a well-designed API strategy

Four additional tracks are also in the works:

• Effective experimentation with Blockchain
• Enable hybrid cloud and multi-speed IT
• Deliver large-scale IoT and analytics applications
• Developing next-generation cognitive applications with Watson

“What we’ve done since then is expand the content in there and refined it based on user feedback. We’ve matured it and expanded it,” Reinitz said.

Each track contains a set of practices and tools to achieve each specific goal.

“The tracks are key because that’s really the prescriptive guidance for how you use the practices to accomplish a specific kind of cloud application or adoption,” she said. “You’ll see there are practices that are pretty much common across all of the tracks, but then there are things that are very specific to those tracks. In addition, we provide tool chain guides and in many cases automation of tool chains to support those tracks.”

The tool chains are open and can be modified. Developers can replace things if they want to use something different, she said.

“The objective overall is to provide prescriptive guidance adopting cloud,” Reinitz said. “We’re taking the lessons we learned from our internal transformation and combining it with the works we’ve been doing in the Bluemix Garages with clients.”

Bluemix Garages

The Garage Method is an extension of IBM’s Bluemix Garages, which are physical locations in start-up communities. They have designers, developers, architects and product managers that work with clients on the Garage Method tracks.

“Their mission is to work with clients to make them successful adopting IBM Cloud, in particular Bluemix,” Reinitz said.

The most recent Bluemix Garage was opened last week in Nice, France. Other Bluemix Garages are located in San Francisco, Toronto and London. Locations are also planned for Melbourne, Australia, and New York.

The Bluemix Garage Method is public and available for anyone to use for free. If an organization needs assistance, IBM offers billable consulting services through the Bluemix Garage, IBM Global Services and IBM partners.