Use event subscriptions for scheduled scale up and down of your IBM Cloud Code Engine apps

Few lines of scripting

Over the past months, I wrote several blog posts related to IBM Cloud Code Engine. Code Engine is a managed, serverless platform for containerized workloads. You can run (web) apps and (batch) jobs, both types can receive events. Code Engine apps have settings for minimum and maximum scaling and have assigned compute resources within these boundaries. A "scale to zero" is possible, i.e., there isn't any app instance running and, because it is pay per use, nothing is charged during that time. Which brings up the question, how can I schedule different min / max scale values, e.g., scale down to zero over night, but have some higher minimums during the day? 

I heard that built-in support is on the roadmap. For now, I am using a Code Engine cron subscription for the job...

Create a REST API with OpenAPI spec for your database objects

Swagger UI for my events API

Recently, I wanted to create REST API for data managed in a Db2 on Cloud database. It was needed for a chatbot project using Watson Assistant. After looking into my options, I settled on APIFlask. In this blog, I am going to share my experiences and some resources for creating a REST API with an OpenAPI specification for database objects.

Containerize your Db2 Python app

De-containerizing my stuff

By following my blog posts (here or at the IBM Cloud site)  or my code samples, you might know that many of my apps are coded in Python. Moreover, many projects involve IBM Db2 (see "How to connect from Python to Db2"). With Docker and other container technologies around and many projects involving Kubernetes / OpenShift or Knative / IBM Cloud Code Engine, the next question is how to containerize / dockerize your Db2 application written in Python. Well, here I share some of my experience...

Some fun with traefik routing on the edge of a reverse proxy

Path-based routing with Traefik

In a recent blog post, I mentioned that I use the traefik edge router / reverse proxy to put a custom domain in front of my IBM Cloud Code Engine apps. Today, I want to share details on how I configured path-based routing, i.e., depending on the path in the URI a different Code Engine app serves the request. The use case is to implement a microservices-based solution architecture with multiple backend services reachable over a single host name (on a custom domain).