I'm choosing a serverless platform for my projects. I have explored AWS and found it excessively complicated: they provide an enormous bunch of settings but some basic scenarios are been too hard to implement.
The other platform looking promising for me is IBM Cloud with its OpenWhisk. And I'd like to check if the necessary capabilities are either implemented or in close plans for implementation.
Questions
Can I use websocket for my functions as a trigger for connect, message and disconnect? I found only a half year old discussion and nothing more. But this feature is demanded for real time applications.
Can I have static websites in both my custom domain and in subpath? I saw recipes where a docker container and lambda functions were employed. But writing my own implementation of Nginx looks nonsense. But this feature is also strongly demanded for single page applications (SPA) and there can be multiple such SPAs on one domain.
This blog with an IBM Cloud Functions overview has links and answers to your second question. There are tutorials on how to use custom domains with IBM Cloud Functions as backend for applications (see this tutorial with static page / SPA custom domain, and recipes for Express and Flask).
IBM Cloud Functions also has a package to post to Websockets. AFAIK there is functionality to listen to Websockets. My understanding is that serverless is incompatible with the "always on" nature of Websockets and the serverless runtime would need an API gateway or similar to manage the communication. If something is received, the action would be invoked.
Support for websockets for the ActionLoop proxy (used by Go,Swift,Python,PHP,Rust and Java) is here: https://github.com/sciabarracom/incubator-openwhisk-runtime-go/tree/websocket-support.
It can be used to build runtimes that support websocket but you need to deploy the runtime by yourself using Kubernetes. The support had ben postponed as an integration of OpenWhisk with Knative is a better path to include it in OpenWhisk.
Related
Can somehow explain me the difference in these products?
As far as I understand IBM ACE (AppConnect) gives you more or iPaas capabalities. It is allows you to make an API.
But from what I understand now is that API Connect is required for the actual API management. Proxy/policies etc.
Does anyone know you these products are licensed? Do you have to API connect for your APIs to be managed, governed etc?
This is not an exhaustive answer, but hopefully it'll point you in the right direction...
App Connect is for building integrations (flows) with various data sources. Could be databases, cloud services like GSuite or Salesforce, or even HTTP endpoints. Those flows could be triggered by events in one of those systems or by an API. You can also do things like turn a database schema into an API. You get the idea.
API Connect is for API governance, security, and socialization. In more concrete terms, it gives you tools for things like: adding authentication and/or authorization to all APIs, bundling APIs together, enforcing rate limits or quotas, providing a portal for sharing/selling your APIs with others, and so on.
You can create APIs using App Connect and stop there--it's usable/invokable without API Connect in the picture. API Connect provides enforcement policies to give you more flexibility in how you call that API and/or give others the ability to invoke the API. The two products complement each other, but an API management product would be required in order to manage and govern the APIs created by App Connect.
In terms of licensing, there are multiple available options. You can purchase the products as standalone software packages that you install and maintain yourself (see IBM Cloud Pak for Integration) or you can leverage the IBM-managed versions that IBM provides via IBM Cloud.
More information is available:
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/api-connect
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/app-connect
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloud-pak-for-integration
Does jBASE support web sockets or any other similar technology to offer real-time interaction capabilities? For example, if I am creating a web based dashboard, can I show real time updates on the charts with a jBASE backend?
Please note, this answer applies to the Zumasys iteration of jBASE not the Temenos T24 flavor.
As of jBASE 5.7.10, jBASE supports building web based dashboards like this by utilizing the jAgent module to create RESTful APIs that you can use to serve traffic from your jBASE system. You can read more about jAgent at our Introduction to jAgent guide and you can see more about the the PICK libraries we provide for REST API development at our APIs page.
You may also be interested in our full-stack-with-pick tutorial on GitHub, which includes lessons on:
How to set up demo data in jBASE
How to set up REST API get endpoints
How to set up a simple Vue.js environment
How to display a database record with Vue.js
This would give you a recipe on building APIs to access the information you're looking to convey in a dashboard, as well as an idea of how to begin working on the dashboard (as it so happens there are many great, free Vue.js based dashboards available on the internet).
For what it is worth we are evaluating expanding the protocols and technology available within the next iteration of jAgent, including but not limited to a look at implementing web sockets.
At this url you can have a look at my project jut to have some context:
https://github.com/Deviad/clarity/tree/feature/hyperledger
Long story short I am building an open source framework for building Escrows that can take advantage of the latest PSD2 https://www.openbankingtracker.com/
It support Cryptocurrency payments and implements some sort of side chain in order to have a proof that a contract was signed.
Basically of all of the things that Istio does what I really need is the Authentication Policy using JWT.
This in order to avoid writing this part in every microservice that I am creating.
Of course the gateway is also something important.
The main issue is that I have no idea while I am developing using my IDE (Intellij IDEA) what I can do in order to avoid having to stop, rebuild and start containers every single time I need to rebuild since once I use Istio, I will need to use Istio also in development, otherwise I would have to write some dummy services that fake the authorization from istio when I want to check if a certain user has the permissions to access a resource.
What possibilities I have to have a lean workflow with Istio and eventually what alternatives to Istio do I have?
As for the workflow part of my question, I have found a possible solution:
https://garden.io
There is a nice workshop available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfi9XqcZ76M
I'm contemplating to use Parse as a platform for my app, as I'm trying to avoid creating and managing the cloud infrastructure myself.
For the sake of simplicity let's say that my app will hook into an Exchange Server and will need to leverage some hosted Machine Learning service to categorize my e-mail and report on insights found.
I'm assuming that Parse would store my core data, while the hosted ML will store the "Big Data" associated with processing for insights.
I'm also expecting my app to receive push notifications generated by the hosted ML service.
Does this sound like a plausible way to go about it and leverage Parse, or am I better off developing the backend myself?
I think parse.com is the right place for you requirements, because they have everything you need like storage of core data, push notifications, cloud module which can be integrated with heroku, social integration, user management functionalities.
They also have large set of client libraries for desktop and mobile apps (node,java,.net etc...) also they have libraries of embedded devices.
The biggest advantage is that everything is setup, and you are focused on software development not on infrastructure things. This is my opinion.
I've been experimenting with the above stack and so far was really impressed. Seems like a viable path forward. The Cloud Code capability of Parse is very solid, and easy to work with. If you want to run services outside of Parse code this us also possible : just issue REST calls.
I am currently working heavily in Azure. I am actually quite fond of ARM (Azure Resource Manager) right now and would love to keep using it. Right now in the old portal, We have a lot of resources tied up as Cloud Services. Now, I know cloud services are available in the new portal, but it seems that Microsoft is moving away from the classic cloud service model. Can someone explain if this is true? If so, what will the new model look like? I already use resources groups to manage Websites (WebApps), so I assume this is where the azure future lies. Will we see the "deprecation" of cloud services on down the line?
I am trying to understand if I need to begin re-structuring my Azure Infrastructure.
Any insight, explanation, or documentation is greatly appreciated.
So there are two things here - Cloud Services and managemenet of Cloud Services.
When you manage Cloud Services in current portal the underlying mechanism used is Azure Service Management (ASM) where as it is Azure Resource Manager (ARM) in the preview portal. To me, ARM is the new way of managing your Cloud resources in Azure (including Cloud Services).
I don't work for Microsoft so I would not know if Cloud Services themselves will be deprecated down the road or not but one thing I think will happen is that ASM will be deprecated in favor of ARM. At some point of time, the only option you will be left with managing your cloud resources will be through Azure Resource Manager. One example that makes me believe this thing is the presence of Classic resource providers (e.g. Classic Storage Resource Provider which enables you to manage storage accounts created in current portal via ASM in the preview portal which works exclusively on ARM).
Personally I can't see a place for cloud services in the new ARM world of Azure. I have always found them a convoluted concept that simply added complexity to a deployment.
In the ARM view of deployments servers are collected together in a VNet, and each server is attached to a Nic which in turn can be connected to the internet. A security group then takes care of ingress / egress rules.
This is a much cleaner deployment method, as it puts connectivity configuration at the server layer instead of mapping them all through a higher layer of abstraction.
I don't see the place of cloud services in ARM, however after a quick search it seems that there is a plan to implement it
Still no direction from the Azure Advisers group other than officially they will not drop support for Cloud Services. I think they are nearing giving us some kind of direction but I can't say anymore than that.
I asked a question about the future of Cloud Services on the recent Azure Compute AMA.
You can read the answers directly on Reddit for all details, below are a few interesting quotes (emphasis mine).
On ARM Integration for Cloud Services:
We are looking at ways to make the transition to ARM easier for Cloud Service customers- one of those options includes CS integration in ARM. This investigation is in the very early stages though, so if you are looking for a solution soon, check out VMSS/ACS/SF/Web Apps (meagan-msft)
And:
I think it's safe to say that if we make any significant investment in CS in the near future, it would be ARM integration, and as Meagan suggests, that's still in planning. Beyond that, there are no major feature improvements on the horizon. We believe the platform is pretty mature at this point. (seanmichaelmckenna)
So it doesn't look like any major innovations will hit Cloud Services soon, however:
Cloud Services are not going anywhere. In fact, many Microsoft services run on Cloud Services, so we heavily rely on them as well. They are fully supported, so feel free to continue to use them.
(meagan-msft)
For those who want to switch to a different Compute service, these recommendations were made:
However, if you would like to check out other services that are integrated with ARM today, we recommend checking out the following:
Web Apps for customers who want a fully managed platform and are building traditional web applications
Service Fabric for customers who want an opinionated application platform and managed infrastructure, but still need some control over the IAAS layer
VM Scale Sets for customers who need IaaS-level control with easy scaling, autoscale and load balancer integration
Azure Container service was also listed as a potential alternative.
Some things to consider (my understanding):
Service Fabric currently (2017) requires at least 5 VM instances, except for dev/test purposes. So probably only an option for larger services
VM Scale Sets is an IaaS offering, i.e. you have to manage OS updates etc. yourself. However, support for automatic OS updates is being worked on.