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Serverless computing is future and IBM Cloud Functions is here
February 20, 2019

Serverless computing is future and IBM Cloud Functions is here

Badheka, Amit | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Functions

We are using IBM Cloud Functions (ICF) to create enterprise level platforms that work with IBM Watson Cognitive services to do event-based processing. We have developed a platform to create Watson Assistant based virtual agents which use IBM Cloud Functions to fetch data from back-end systems or DB.
  • ICF is a cost-effective solution when it comes to a cloud-based solution. We used Spring Boot Micro-services previously but it was costly because the application is continuously running and hence incurs operating costs even if the services are not used by the application.
  • It scales very well and without too many manual interventions from the developers or support team. This is very useful when we have applications catering to large user bases like a chatbot or payment wallet.
  • The ICF also works well in high demand data processing based on events (i.e. in a virtual agent platform) Whenever we receive a new chat request, the ICF can trigger sentiment analysis to analyze the chats.
  • Need more out of the box support and integration to receive events from services like MongoDB and NoSQL databases.
  • Definitely has positive impact due to the pay only when used feature
  • Lightweight cloud services help with scaling without high investment in infrastructure
  • ICF is a lightweight service and does not require runtime configurations
  • Scalable on demand and hence there is no need to pay for runtime costs
IBM Watson Analytics, Watson Studio (formerly IBM Data Science Experience), IBM Cloud Foundry
IBM Cloud Functions are well suited for:
1. Lightweight micro-service development for cloud-based applications
2. Event-based data processing that requires dynamic scaling
3. Cost reductions where application does not require to use functions all the time
4. ICF is good where you need integration with many external service providers

ICF may not be a good solution where an application is not modularized in fine-grained services or functions.