cron-like scheduling on IBM Cloud

cron-like scheduling

Some days ago I stumbled over my 2015 post "Bluemix: Simple cron-like service for my Python code". It is not just the name Bluemix which is dated. Since then, it has transformed into IBM Cloud Platform and has added serverless compute options like IBM Cloud Functions (OpenWhisk) and recently IBM Cloud Code Engine. Both of them support "eventing", event-based execution of code. And both support Python code as well as many other programming languages like Node.js, Go (Golang), PHP and more. So, what does it take to set up cron-like scheduling? Not much.

Cloud tutorial on serveless web app and eventing

A follow-up from my last post on Python decorators:

Solution architecture

Some years back, on IBM Cloud, we introduced an IBM Cloud solution tutorial for GitHub traffic analytics based on Cloud Foundry and IBM Cloud Functions. A Cloud Functions action is triggered daily to collect traffic data. The action stores the data in a Db2 database. Users can then analyse the data in a Python Flask app served by Cloud Foundry.

Today, that same solution scenario and app are still available, but they are served by IBM Cloud Code Engine. Code Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform that runs your containerized workloads, including web apps, microservices, event-driven functions or batch jobs. The slightly renamed tutorial — "Serverless web app and eventing for data retrieval and analytics" — demonstrates how the existing app can be containerized and both served as web app and and used to process the daily data collection event.

Continue reading the article on the IBM Cloud blog.

Pseudo-decorators for my Python Flask app

Secured Python Flask app on Code Engine

Recently, I migrated an existing Python app from a Cloud Foundry to an IBM Cloud Code Engine deployment. The Flask app uses decorators for the routes and for OIDC-based authentication. For usability, the app should start up even without anything configured yet and the OIDC decorators being invalid. It required to some IMHO tricky coding.

JWT token authentication in Db2 runtimes like Python or Node.js

Python script connecting to Db2 with JWT

Some weeks ago I discussed how to configure JWT-based token authentication in Db2. I set up Db2 to accept JWS identity tokens and then connected to my test database using the command line. But how do you connect from a programming language like Python or Node.js? Here is what I needed.