IBM recently renamed IBM Bluemix, their PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering, to IBM Cloud. This new name makes more sense, and much better describes what it is. From a marketing view, this is a good change.
From a technical point, nothing changes. You still have a huge amount of different services and API:s to pout together in any way you like. At MWLUG 2017 in Washington, DC I demonstrated how to build a translation tool and a text-to-speech tool in a few minutes using IBM Cloud (back then still called Bluemix) and then use that functionality in your web applications or even in the IBM Notes client.
I was just scratching the surface on IBM Cloud, using Node-RED and IBM Watson to make this possible. If you haven’t signed up for a free IBM Cloud account, go ahead and do it. Spend a few hours looking around, and I am sure you will find several useful tools.
Why not use IBM Cloud to host your Mongo DB or SQL database? Or take advantage of the powerful Watson API? You can focus on developing your applications, instead of having to build the infrastructure yourself. I see this modular approach as a good way to build applications in the future.