I recently discovered an interesting feature of the IBM Cloud CLI: plugins. These plugins, which are usually linked to specific IBM Cloud services, add new commands and functions to the IBM Cloud CLI. The IBM Cloud CLI provides a simple interface to install, uninstall, update and search for plugins via the ibmcloud plugin command. To use a plugin, you must first install it with the ibmcloud plugin install command. Here’s an example: ...
To access an IBM Cloud service instance, you must have an IAM access token. To obtain an IAM access token, you must have an API key for the service. Access tokens can be obtained directly from the IBM Cloud IAM service, by making an HTTP query to the API endpoint at https://iam.cloud.ibm.com/identity/token and including an API key in the request. Here’s an example: bash curl -X POST 'https://iam.cloud.ibm.com/identity/token' -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' -d 'grant_type=urn:ibm:params:oauth:grant-type:apikey&apikey=YOUR-API-KEY-HERE' However, these access tokens are short-lived - typically, they expire after 60 minutes and need to be renewed after that expiry period. ...
IBM Cloudant is a fully-managed, distributed database that runs as a service on IBM Cloud. It is based on Apache CouchDB and the easiest way to access it is with an IBM Cloudant client library. As of this writing, IBM CLoudant client libraries are available for Node.js, Python, Go and Java. To illustrate how this works, I’ll provide a few examples of how to connect to, and use, an IBM Cloudant database service from Node.js using the Node.js client library. I’ll assume here that you have already deployed an IBM Cloudant service and have obtained service credentials for it. ...
IBM Cloudant is a fully-managed, distributed database that runs as a service on IBM Cloud. It is based on Apache CouchDB (although it is not open source itself) and can be accessed using a standard HTTP REST API. If you’re building an application that uses IBM Cloudant as a data store, this REST API makes it easy to interact with the database service from any language that has an HTTP client library, even if that language doesn’t have a native driver or SDK for IBM Cloudant. ...
A database in the cloud is a wonderful thing. It can serve as a secure, reliable and (most important) off-site data store for your application. It can also come in handy under different testing scenarios: for example, when you need to test an application refactor but can’t be bothered to spin up a database container locally, or when you’re trying to benchmark application performance under heavy load. A good example of a cloud-native database is IBM Cloudant. IBM Cloudant is a fully-managed, distributed database that runs as a service on IBM Cloud. It is based on Apache CouchDB (although it is not open source itself) and stores documents using standard JSON. It can be accessed using a standard HTTP REST API. ...
To access an IBM Cloud service instance, you need service credentials. These credentials can be generated via the IBM Cloud Dashboard or the IBM Cloud CLI. My preferred approach is always to use the CLI, but it can be confusing the first few times you attempt it. Here’s a quick cheat sheet: Create the service instance (read more about service instance creation via the CLI). Here is an example of creating a Watson Tone Analyzer instance named myta: ...
Most of the time, I use the IBM Cloud Dashboard with my browser to manage applications, instantiate services and check status. But sometimes, the point-and-click approach is just too slow. So, when I feel the need for speed, I switch over to the IBM Cloud CLI instead. This CLI, which is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux, provides a full-featured alternative to the browser-based IBM Cloud Dashboard. The IBM Cloud CLI is particularly convenient for quick service instantiation. In the middle of writing code and need to launch an object storage service or a message queue for quick testing? The IBM Cloud CLI gets it done with a single command: ibmcloud resource service-instance-create. ...
If you’re building a small, single-purpose Web application and you want to run it in the cloud, the the typical option is to reach for a small cloud server from Amazon, Google or Azure. Those servers are relatively cheap to run and easy to deploy, but there’s an ongoing investment of time and effort required to keep them secure and updated. In many cases, a even easier solution is to run your application using a Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform. This is essentially a server-less deployment which hosts your code as a standalone function (or series of inter-connected functions) in the cloud and executes it on demand in response to incoming requests, or at a pre-defined schedule. The key advantage here is there is almost no administrative overhead related to server hosting or maintenance, plus you can easily scale up (or down) the deployment as needed. ...
For people suffering from asthma, a peak flow meter makes it easy to monitor lung capacity and understand how changes in weather and season affect their condition. Typically, this information is stored as discrete readings in an “asthma diary”. The problem with a paper diary, though, is that as the number of readings increases, so does the difficulty of analyzing them in a holistic way. To make this easier, I decided to build a simple cloud application to both record meter readings electronically and provide visualization tools to make analysis as simple as a one-button click. ...
When I first started with this WordPress blog, I installed the Custom Content Type Manager (CCTM) plugin to help me manage custom content types. Although this has been perfectly adequate for my needs, I’ve been looking to migrate over to the Pods plugin for a while now, if only because it seems to offer a bunch of additional features (relationships, a REST API…) and a nicer interface. And recently, when CCTM appeared to have crashed on me for a couple of days (turned out to be a stale cache), I decided to take the plunge. ...