Thoughts on how to move from Cloud Functions to Code Engine

Moving code and containers

IBM Cloud Code Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform to (not only) run your containerized workloads. It has evolved a lot since March 2021, the time when I published the blog post Migrating Cloud Functions Code to Code Engine. In 2021, there were only Code Engine apps and jobs. Earlier this year, Code Engine added support for functions(Function-as-a-Service, FaaS). Thus, in this post I am going to take a fresh look at that topic and discuss the options on how to move from Cloud Functions to Code Engine. 

Tips and tricks for using IBM Cloud Code Engine functions

Utilize Code Engine runtime information

Over the past weeks, I started to use IBM Cloud Code Engine functions. Code Engine is IBM Cloud's fully managed, serverless platform to run containerized workloads. It offers apps, jobs, and most recently functions (Function-as-a-Service, Faas) as deployment model. The following tips and tricks help you in cutting down deployment cycles and in designing function-based APIs.

Unicode string length, code points, and Db2

Byte length of (Unicode) strings

After my recent blog post "🎃 Unicode characters and Db2 🕸️ 🏚️", I had some follow-up discussions. One was around how to determine the Unicode UTF-8 byte length of strings in a non-Unicode Db2 database. There were solutions proposed that required data export to analyze the data externally or to implement some functions or procedures. I insisted that there is an SQL-based solution. Here is my proposal.

Db2 11.5.9 is available

The latest release of Db2 is available, labeled Db2 11.5.9 (or Db2 11.5 Mod 9 Fix Pack 0). The usual page, download Db2 fix packs by version for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, has the binaries. The highlights of Db2 11.5.9 have their own page in the Db2 documentation.