News on IBM Cloud and Db2 - December 2017 Edition

Another month and a lot of news

In the middle of November I reported about significant changes to Bluemix and IBM's cloud offerings. A month has passed and I want to give you an update to some news I am excited about.

I try to regularly read over the "What's in IBM Cloud" section in the IBM Cloud documentation. There were two significant announcements.

• The new Resource Groups allow simpler management of all what is in your account (a.k.a. "resources"). You can now group apps, services, virtual machines, Kubernetes-based container services and more and easily assign access privileges.
• With the introduction of the Resource Groups also came the IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management. It facilitates fine-grained access control utilizing API keys, service IDs and more.

The two above should keep you busy, but there is more. If you are a Db2 afficionado like I, then you probably have subscribed to the "What's New in IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud, IBM Db2 Warehouse, and IBM Db2 on Cloud". Did you know that MySQL and PostgreSQL are now available in the web console as data sources for federation? That makes it easy to access data coming from a LAMP stack.

As you might know, I am using and write about the IBM Watson Conversation service. What I liked from their "Release Notes" is a new beta feature to directly call actions from within a dialog node. IBM Cloud Functions are supported. I put that to a test and wrote a Slack bot backed by Watson Conversation that directly queries a Db2 database. I need to beautify the code and write it down (and submit it to IDUG).

I wrote a tutorial about how to generate, access and analyze application logs on IBM Cloud. You can find it in the Solution Tutorials as part of the IBM Cloud documentation.

If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post, please reach out to me on Twitter (@data_henrik) or LinkedIn.