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Overview
Focus on writing code, not on managing infrastructure
IBM Cloud® Code Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform. Bring your container images, batch jobs, or source code and let IBM Cloud Code Engine manage and secure the underlying infrastructure for you. There is no need to size, deploy, or scale container clusters yourself. And no networking skills are required either.
Serverless use cases
Deploy your source code
Deploy your source code
Develop in your choice of language and then “push” your source code to the cloud without worrying about creating or managing containers. Easily connect your code to managed services such as object storage, databases or event streams.
Create batch jobs
Create batch jobs
Batch jobs are ideal for nonevent-driven processing – such as ETL workloads, simulations and AI data model processing. Create powerful run-to-completion batch jobs with infinite scale-out (CPU, memory, execution time) and pay only for the resources you need.
Benefits
Go live in seconds
Focus on your code
Security included
Unified experience
Features
A single runtime environment. Any workload. Scale on demand.
Fully managed infrastructure
Open source frameworks for container orchestration, service mesh and more — all managed and optimized for you.
Autoscaling down to zero
Automatically scale your workloads up and down – even down to zero – and pay only for what you use.
Simplified app security
Secure networking, pod security policies, resource quotas and limit ranges.
No Kubernetes training needed
Cluster complexity is invisible to you. Focus on your code and not on configuring and securing clusters or VMs.
A tour of the UI
Overview

Overview
The overview window of the IBM Cloud Code Engine user interface explains the benefits of the product and enables you to begin deploying an application or running a job with a container image.
Create or deploy

Create or deploy
The “Start creating” window of the IBM Cloud Code Engine user interface is where you can choose to deploy an application or create a job to run.
Project dashboard

Project dashboard
The “my-project” window of the IBM Cloud Code Engine user interface shows a summary of your current applications, jobs, image builds and more, in addition to those recently updated.
Configurations

Configurations
The “my-applications” window of the IBM Cloud Code Engine user interface shows your current configurations and jobs that are running.
Frequently asked questions
How does IBM Cloud Code Engine help developers?
IBM Cloud Code Engine is a fully managed serverless platform that can be used to host cloud native applications whether those are container images, 12-factor apps, functions, batch jobs or just a piece of code. Developers get the best of all worlds by simply choosing which runtime feature they want instead of having to choose one type of hosting platform (CaaS, PaaS, FaaS) with its runtime limitations. IBM Cloud Code Engine abstracts away the complexities of the runtime hosting environment, allowing developers to focus on code and not infrastructure management. It allows developers to deploy various artifacts (container images, source code, batch jobs and the like) in a single user experience and will dynamically scale the resulting applications up and down — even to zero — so users pay only when their workloads are running.
What is serverless?
Serverless is an approach to computing that allows developers to focus their time and effort on their code and the business logic instead of worrying about infrastructure. The infrastructure management tasks (for example, provisioning, securing, scaling, scheduling, patching and the like) are the responsibilities of the cloud provider. IBM Cloud Code Engine expands on that concept by including the runtime characteristics of the other as-a-service platforms, allowing developers to run any type of code from a unified experience.
How does IBM Cloud Code Engine relate to Kubernetes?
IBM Cloud Code Engine is based on Kubernetes, but it hides its complexities so developers can focus on writing code instead of managing the hosting environment. While this is a great experience for most users, some will want to access the full Kubernetes configuration (for example, to integrate with other Kubernetes workloads). IBM Cloud Code Engine allows this by exposing familiar Kubernetes tooling (for example, kubectl).
Kubernetes Products |
IBM Cloud Code Engine |
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service or Red Hat® OpenShift® on IBM Cloud |
Red Hat OpenShift on premises |
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Delivered as |
IBM Cloud Service |
IBM Cloud Service |
Installable software on-premises |
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Tenancy |
Multitenant (shared clusters) |
Single-tenant (dedicated cluster) |
Single-tenant (dedicated cluster) |
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Cost |
Pay only when workloads run (GB-sec, vCPU-sec and invocations) |
Constant billing for whole cluster (size of cluster time) |
Constant licensing fee and cost of infrastructure |
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Management |
Fully managed |
Partially managed |
Self managed |
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Skills |
No container, cluster, networking or infrastructure skills required |
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service/Red Hat OpenShift, networking and infrastructure skills required |
Red Hat OpenShift, networking and infrastructure skills required |
Does the free tier for IBM Cloud Code Engine expire?
No, but there are monthly limits that reset each month. This will allow you to run small applications or jobs. Once the Free Tier limit is reached, cost will vary based on:
- Memory and CPU allocated per instance of the workload
- Number of instances
- Lifetime of each instance
- Number of http-calls
How do I run an application in IBM Cloud Code Engine?
An application is a process that exposes an HTTP endpoint. You can use it as the backend for your web or mobile application, REST API serve, and proxy application. In IBM Cloud Code Engine, you run one CLI command. See the tutorial to get everything set up properly, including running your container image, exposing an HTTPS endpoint and setting up auto-scaling.
How do I run a batch job in IBM Cloud Code Engine?
Batch processing is appropriate for those frequently used programs that can be executed without human interaction. Developers can run large-scale batch job instances in parallel to support various workloads, such as heavy compute tasks, ETL (for example, transcoding), map and reduce, simulations (scientific compute), rendering and any type of parallel data processing. Batch jobs in IBM Cloud Code Engine run as containers, meaning you only need to package them as images and submit them to IBM Cloud Code Engine. That way, your batch job can be isolated for security and your specified batch job CPU and memory request can easily be accomplished.
Can IBM Cloud Code Engine build a container image for me if I don't know how to build one?
Yes. If you want to focus only on writing your source code and don’t want to take care of the image build process, then you can use the build container images feature. You provide source code directly (using a Git repo), and IBM Cloud Code Engine builds and manages the container image for you. Those familiar with IBM Cloud Foundry should recognize the similarities. IBM Cloud Code Engine supports two build strategies. One is Dockerfile build, which uses the Kaniko builder tool. The other is Cloud Native Buildpack, which uses Paketo Buildpacks.