On April 14, 2021 we hosted our Cloud Native Day (brought to you by the IBM community) and we were very happy to see the huge interest when we presented IBM Cloud Code Engine.
Audience brought in some great questions and Simon Moser, Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM, was hard at work answering them all on chat panel.
Some are below (including additional explanation and links) so you get a taste of what your peers are asking us and, remember:
Check out the Q&A you might have missed:
Q- Cloud Native Software Engineer at Large South Korean multinational conglomerate: I started learning K8S, now with Code Engine, can I stop learning K8S and jump to Code Engine?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: No - I think K8s and CE target different personas. It doesn't hurt to understand both, and then pick depending on the use-case at hand.
Q- Principal Architect at Major American Airline: Will code engine support integrating with other IBM PaaS offerings via private connections?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: Yes. Outbound connections, e.g.: a Code Engine App calling to a COS private endpoints, work already today. Inbound connections, i.e.: some service calling a CE app that sits on a private endpoint, are in the making and will come later this year.
Q- Technical Specialist at American multinational technology company: What about legacy mainframe apps being modernized for move to cloud?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: If you can package them in a container... I ran some Cobol on Code engine last week. I tried it with this sample: https://github.com/IBM/kubernetes-cobol
Q- .NET Developer at Non-profit international organization in the information technology field: Does IBM Cloud Code Engine use Lambda to support higher level language development?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: no. It uses Knative.
Q- Cloud Native Software Engineer at Large South Korean multinational conglomerate: Today in cloud deployments, we create VM or Kubernetes clusters in multiple regions for resiliency. How do you do that with Cloud Engine?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: You would create namespaces in different regions. Learn more at https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/codeengine?topic=codeengine-ha-dr
Q- Solution Architect at American multinational technology company: How about stateful workloads?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: As long as you store the state in an external service (like COS) - yes. The containers file system is ephemeral.
Q- Technical Architect at International IT service provider: I guess external storage services would be configurable through a simplified equivalent to persistent volumes and persistent volume claims?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: Not really, it uses a concept called Service Bindings. Learn more at: https://developer.ibm.com/articles/ibm-cloud-code-engine-service-binding-on-managed-serverless-platform/
Q- Solutions Architect at American file hosting service company: If I have an app running in Cloud Foundry, do I need to do anything to run in Code Engine?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: Depends on what language it is written in, but if anything. it's fairly little effort. Learn more at: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/migrating-from-cloud-foundry-to-code-engine
Q- Site Reliability Engineer at Large home improvement retailer in the United States: The demos show app configurations being done interactively. How would you do it through a CI/CD pipeline?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: Your CI/CD task would call the Code Engine API or the CLI.
Q- Senior Manager Network Operations Centre at Nigerian telecommunications company: Does IBM Cloud Code engine support Kubernetes?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: Yes. It runs on top of Kubernetes. You can target your Kubernetes namespace like this: `ibmcloud ce project select –name <name> -k`. With the -k option, the CLI will set your kubecfg to the right namespace, andyou can use kubectl now to interact with it.
Q- Cloud DevOps Engineer at American multinational technology company: How to handle SSL certificates and network control with Code Engine. Should everything be inside the docker container itself?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: You get a default cert from us for every project. You can also put a custom Load Balancer in the front and manage the certs there yourself - check the Code Engine documentations: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/codeengine?topic=codeengine-getting-started
Q- .NET Developer at Non-profit international organization in the information technology field: How many AWS-like availability zones or regions does IBM Cloud Code Engine have throughout North America and globally?
A- Simon Moser, IBM: Right now (14 April), we support three regions: one in US (us-south), one in Europe (eu-de), and one in AP (jp-tok). Many more to come, including CA-TOR and us-east in North America in the next months. Each region itself is made up of three Availability Zones internally.
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Carolina Pereira
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