IBM Cloud Functions (discontinued)

IBM Cloud Functions was a serverless function-as-a-service (FaaS) platform on IBM Cloud, based on Apache OpenWhisk. It is discontinued. IBM reached end of support in late 2024, and IBM recommends that remaining users migrate to IBM Cloud Code Engine.

Key Capabilities

• Actions: Developers wrote code, called actions, that responded to external events. An action takes one JSON object as input and returns a JSON object.
• On-demand execution: The platform hosted, executed, and scaled actions based on the number of incoming events, and users did not provision or manage servers or other infrastructure.
• Triggers and sequences: IBM's migration guidance lists triggers and sequences, alongside actions, as the entities customers needed to move. Triggers start actions, and sequences chain actions together.
• Web actions: An action could be exposed as an HTTP endpoint through a web action.
• Parameters: Values such as API keys could be set in the console and passed in with the request.

Status and Migration

• Status: IBM Cloud Functions is discontinued and no longer supported.
• Migration target: IBM's guidance names IBM Cloud Code Engine, a managed service with apps, jobs, and functions. IBM states that a Code Engine function is the closest match to an existing action in many cases. IBM's guidance says that Code Engine runtimes do not ship with the libraries that Cloud Functions runtimes did, so users must supply them through a custom container or a source build.
• Code changes: The guidance says users must explicitly export main(), return a status code, headers, and a body, because Code Engine functions are always web actions, and read environment variables from process.env instead of the request payload.

Audience & Use Cases

• Audience: Developers building event-driven applications on IBM Cloud.
• Use Case: Running code in response to HTTP requests and other events without maintaining servers.
• Use Case: Existing users planning or completing a move to Code Engine.