Compute Options & Infrastructure as Code

Code Engine vs. IKS

Code Engine is fully managed serverless: deploy a container, batch job, or function without managing infrastructure — it scales to zero when idle. IKS (or OpenShift) gives full control over cluster configuration and Kubernetes primitives at the cost of operational overhead. A common pattern: start on Code Engine for simplicity, move to IKS only once workload needs (custom operators, specific K8s APIs) actually demand it.

ibmcloud ce project create --name my-project
ibmcloud ce application create --name my-app \
  --image us.icr.io/my-namespace/my-app:1.0 \
  --cpu 0.5 --memory 1G --min-scale 0 --max-scale 10

ibmcloud ce jobrun submit --name nightly-report --image us.icr.io/my-namespace/report:1.0

Cloud Functions (OpenWhisk)

// action.js — an OpenWhisk action
function main(params) {
  return { message: `Hello, ${params.name || 'World'}!` };
}
exports.main = main;

// ibmcloud fn action create hello action.js
// ibmcloud fn action invoke hello --param name Alice --result
// ibmcloud fn api create /hello GET hello --response-type json

Schematics (Terraform)

# Schematics runs Terraform in a managed workspace — state and locking
# are handled for you, no separate remote-state backend to set up.
ibmcloud schematics workspace new --file workspace.json
ibmcloud schematics plan --id <workspace-id>
ibmcloud schematics apply --id <workspace-id>

# workspace.json points at a Terraform repo, e.g.:
# {
#   "name": "my-vpc",
#   "template_repo": { "url": "https://github.com/org/my-vpc-terraform" },
#   "template_data": [{ "folder": ".", "type": "terraform_v1.5" }]
# }

Auditing

Activity Tracker records auditable events across IBM Cloud services — API calls, resource changes, IAM policy modifications — for compliance and security investigation, analogous to AWS CloudTrail or Azure Activity Log.