About cookies on this site Our websites require some cookies to function properly (required). In addition, other cookies may be used with your consent to analyze site usage, improve the user experience and for advertising. For more information, please review your options. By visiting our website, you agree to our processing of information as described in IBM’sprivacy statement. To provide a smooth navigation, your cookie preferences will be shared across the IBM web domains listed here.
Serverless on IBM Cloud
Run your container, application code, batch job or function on a fully managed container runtime with IBM Cloud® Code Engine
Focus on writing code that serves your customers, not on managing infrastructure
IBM Cloud® Code Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform. Bring your container images, batch jobs, source code or function together in one place and let IBM Cloud Code Engine manage and help secure the underlying infrastructure. There's no need to size, deploy or scale container clusters yourself. And no advanced networking skills are required.
Serverless use cases
Build great apps in the language of your choice, then get them in front of customers faster.
Pay for exactly the resources that you use.
Use one application to deploy and help securely integrate web apps, containers, batch jobs and functions.
No infrastructure management needed. Your sizing, scaling, and networking are covered.
Your apps are automatically secured with SSL and isolated from other workloads.
Build container images for different polyglot services, easily push them to a managed serverless platform and generate traffic.
Build container images for different polyglot services, push them to a managed serverless platform and generate traffic.
Case studies
Use a single runtime environment. Then scale on demand.
Pick the type of workload that best fits your needs without learning multiple serverless products. IBM Cloud Code Engine is built on the open-source technologies Kubernetes and Knative—allowing you full access to the container ecosystem tooling and keeping your workload portable.
Code Engine helps protect your apps by utilizing encrypted traffic and tight access controls. Isolated environments amp up security by separating workloads. Code Engine adheres to a wide range of industry standards and regulations.
Code Engine automatically scales your workloads up and down, even down to zero when there are no requests. Help meet customer demands while only paying for the resources you consume.
Make run-to-completion components a part of your application. Offload long-running and resource-hungry tasks to async.
How it works
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 helps solve for the complexities of the runtime hosting environment, allowing developers to focus on code and not infrastructure management. IBM Cloud Code Engine 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.
IBM Cloud Code Engine is based on Kubernetes, but it helps reduce 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 | |||
Delivered as | IBM Cloud Service | IBM Cloud Service | Installable software on-premises | |||
Tenancy | Multitenant (shared clusters) | Single-tenant (dedicated cluster) | Single-tenant (dedicated cluster) | |||
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 | |||
Management | Fully managed | Partially managed | Self managed | |||
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 |
Code Engine includes a free tier so that you can experiment with Code Engine before you commit. This is a monthly limit that resets each month and allows you to run small applications and 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.
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.
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.
