IBM Cloud Code Engine

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.