Wednesday, October 31, 2018

IBM Watson Assistant: Chatbot tool now supports testing client actions

Test your chatbot
Are you (already) using the Watson Conversation Tool I wrote? There is good news because I added support for testing client side actions. As you might know, IBM Watson Assistant features both client and server side actions to enhance responses with data from external services. In a blog post from this Summer, I wrote that I added support for testing server side actions. They are implemented using IBM Cloud Functions. Client actions are, well, executed on the application side. Read on to learn how to test them.

Monday, October 22, 2018

Automated reports with IBM Cloud Functions, Db2 and Slack

GitHub Traffic Analytics
One of my (many) favorite IBM Cloud solution tutorials is about combining serverless and Cloud Foundry for data retrieval and analytics. I blogged about it and described how an automated IBM Cloud Functions action retrieves GitHub statistics and stores them in Db2. Using an embedded Cognos dashboard and regular Javascript / HTML tables, the solution offers GitHub Traffic Analytics. I extended that solution by automatic weekly reports that are posted to Slack.

Thursday, October 11, 2018

Use a custom domain, manage TLS certificates and apply e2e security to cloud app

End to end security for a cloud app on IBM Cloud
Well, that title is a little bit long and ugly, but it basically describes what I wanted to tell you about today. A while ago, I blogged that my team published a tutorial "Apply end to end security to a cloud application". It demonstrates how to use secure network traffic (data in transit), cloud object storage (data at rest), and the app itself by access control (authentication). The app runs on the IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (IKS). By default, the app is exposed on an IBM Cloud-supplied hostname and domain. I updated the tutorial to show how to use a custom domain and deploy a TLS certificate managed by the IBM Cloud Certificate Manager.

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

BYOK to encrypt Kubernetes secrets on IBM Cloud

Add Key Protect
Few days ago, it was announced that IBM Cloud Key Protect integrates with the Kubernetes Service. It means that cluster secrets such as service credentials, TLS certificate information and other confidential information can be encrypted using a managed root key. That root key is either generated or can be imported (bring your own key, BYOK). What needs to be done to wrap this additional layer of security around your cluster? Read on.

Saturday, October 6, 2018

Impressions from Zeppelin flight

Zeppelin flight
Recently, I had the opportunity to fly on a Zeppelin NT, the kind of Zeppelin I had blogged about before. The 6+ hour flight was a once in a lifetime opportunity because it could not be booked. It took as from Bonn Hangelar (EDKB) to Friedrichshafen (EDNY). Our journey started with a detour over Cologne, then following the Rhine up to Karlsruhe, taking a turn to Stuttgart and from there down south to Lake Constance (see the rough route we took on the right).

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Db2 Node.js and Python drivers and ORM

I am back from the Db2 Aktuell conference with my talk about Db2 app development and IBM Cloud. One of the many questions I received since then is about where to find the Db2 drivers for Node.js and Python. What type of ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) libraries are supported? Let me briefly answer that here and provide some links.
Db2 drivers turning bits into information

Db2 and Node.js or Python

Db2 supports many programming languages for database application development, a good overview is in the Db2 Knowledge Center. Node.js and Python use the open source drivers for IBM Database Servers that are available on GitHub.
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