Not the worse IBM product
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Our IBM Cloud Functions [connects] various services by picking up JSON data from buckets at a certain time interval, modifying it, and saving it to another bucket. We also have functions that connect to NLU, functions that connect to API endpoints, etc.
Pros
- Relatively updated in terms of node versions supported
Cons
- A trigger just stopped working for no reason at all. The IBM support team classified the issue as "Network connection dropped", we had huge costs associated with the outage.
- There is no CI/CD setup through the dashboard, Toolchain doesn't work with functions, so we had to implement a manual solution.
- The function code execution time is too slow - we tested the execution time of a function and a code running in a Cloud Foundry app and came up with 600ms for the function and 300ms for the CF app.
- Documentation in terms of CI/CD is also a little bit hard to get, not enough examples of manifest files that include triggers, functions, and API endpoints.
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM Cloud Functions [is] not the worse product on the IBM cloud. I decided to write this review as I thought it would be balanced. I would still use functions to set up a serverless architecture where execution time is pretty quick and the code is relatively simple.
I wouldn't use IBM Cloud Functions for async calls obviously, as costs could be higher. The functions documentation is lacking in terms of CI/CD, and there are unexplainable errors occurring - like the network connection that I mentioned. So I wouldn't just rely on IBM Cloud Functions too much for the entire system, but make sure it's diversified.