Serverless and Kubernetes Workshop on IBM Cloud

Kubernetes
And
Serverless Computing
Workshop
With
IBM Cloud
Kubernetes and Serverless Workshop with IBM Cloud 1 / 39

Administrative Stuff before we start 3
Create account 3
Applying the voucher 5
Creating a Kubernetes Cluster 7
Serverless Computing 9
Quickstart “Hello World” 10
Seeing Serverless Code 10
REST access to a function 11
Postman 13
Web access to a function 14
A more complex example - Cloudant Events 15
Create a database 16
Gettings Database credentials 17
Create a database 19
Deploy the template 20
Function code 20
Add a document to the database 21
Monitor serverless computing 22
Kubernetes 23
Nodes 23
Web Apps 24
Python Watson Assistant Basic 25
Deploy project 25
Toolchain 27
See the demo in action 28
Kubernetes Dashboard 29
Kubernetes yaml file 30
Orion - the build-in editor 32
Repositor code checkin 34
See your application in action 35
The Watson Assistant 36
Intents 37
Entities 38
Conversation Flow 39

Administrative Stuff before we start
Hello and welcome to a journey into Serverless, Kubernetes, Devops, Watson Service and
hopefully fun. First of all, this tutorial is not meant to be done in one session, so don’t worry if
you don’t make it in the workshop itself. So let’s get ready to rock and roll.
Create account
We start with signing up for an
account at https://bluemix.net.
Sign up with your Email address,
name and a very secure
password.

After clicking create IBM creates a new account for you.
IBM will send you an email as shown below, please
click the containing link.
After clicking the link in your email your IBM ID and therefore the IBM Cloud account is ready
to be used. Yeah!

Welcome to the world of IBM Cloud aka Bluemix. This is the main dashboard. Whenever you
are lost somewhere just press the IBM Cloud button on top left to come back to this
dashboard.
The newly created account is a so called free account. Forever free without expiration but
with a limited amount of possibilities. So first we need to add a voucher to upgrade to a
normal account. This can be done in the Manage / Billing and Usage menu.
Applying the voucher

Under Billing / Feature Code please add the voucher code from IBM.
Sorry if you have to type it in and can not copy-paste it, it’s really long.
After doing so you will get this upgrade
information box. Very important here, the
upgrade to the trial account which we will
need for Kubernetes.

Let’s go back the the dashboard and press the “hamburger” menu icon on the left top side.
This will bring us to the All Categories Menu. For example here to the Watson Services part
where you can try the IBM Watson Services for free, give it try later on.
Creating a Kubernetes Cluster
As creating a Kubernetes Cluster in Bluemix takes some time we do it first before we
continue to work with the serverless part. The cluster management can be found under
“Containers”.
Please press the
“Containers in
Kubernetes Clusters”.
This will bring you to a
list of available
features. For now we
just press the “Create”
button.

Here we can see the kind of Kubernetes cluster we can create. With the trial account we can
only configure one free cluster. Let’s select the free cluster now. And press “Create Cluster”.
This will start the Kubernetes management system and one worker node.
IBM Cloud is doing now all the magic which is necessary to create a Kubernetes cluster in
the background.
Under Overview we can see the Cluster is in “Deploying” state and has one pending node.

Serverless Computing
Let’s give the IBM Cloud system some time to setup the Kubernetes cluster while we work
on the serverless part. If you don’t see the menu on the left side just press the “Hamburg”
menu button next to IBM
cloud again. Then press
“functions” or as marketing
likes to call it “serverless
computing”.
Serverless consists of
actions (functions written in
python, javascript or even C
or C++ inside docker
containers) which are
orchestrated in sequences
and triggered by external
events like e.g. DB entries,
IoT or slack chats. We will
see how all this works now
and try it with two examples.
Beside using the command
line tools (CLI) there is a very nice way to try out IBM functions or openwhisk just in a
browser window. So please press “start creating”.

Quickstart “Hello World”
For now we use the Quickstart Template to test out a very simple “Hello World”.
Please press the “Hello World”
template.
Seeing Serverless Code
This brings us to the configuration menu. Here you can change the language for the
template and give the package a nice name. It doesn't matter which language you choose,
as this is just a hello world and it’s available in many different languages, the concept is
always the same. Please select your favourite one and see how the functions should be
written in a very simple case of hello world. The following picture shows the javascript code.
As you can see each function is called with a json object as parameter and returns one json
object.

As you can see in the code the function checks for the key “name” in the input json and
returns a greeting with the name if it is in the json dictionary or just “hello stranger”.
Gratulation you just deployed your first serverless application. Well a very small one but it’s
already deployed in the IBM cloud and ready to be used globally. Now let’s see for the other
menu parts in the serverless menu.
Under runtime the timeout and the maximum amount of RAM used by this function can be
configured. As serverless computing is charged my TIME*RAM it can become really handy
to check here for the upper thresholds in order to minimize the cost in case a function does
not end or consumes all available RAM.
REST access to a function
Now we have a function deployed in the cloud but how can we trigger / access this function
to do some useful stuff for us. “Endpoints” lets you configure REST API endpoints or even
very simple web access in case you want your application to be public accessible.

First is the REST API endpoint. As this one is secured by an API-KEY we first need to
configure this API-KEY by pressing the link API-KEY. For now please copy this KEY by
pressing the copy icon to your clipboard.
The API-KEY consists of two parts, separated by “:”. The first part can we seen as a
username, while the second part is the password. An example API-KEY looks like this:

Postman
Testing a REST api can be done without any computer language by a very handy tool called
POSTMAN (https://www.getpostman.com). If you want you can install it now for the REST
api test, or just take a look at the screenshots for now.
Select POST as connection type and copy the URL from IBM Cloud into it. The API-KEY is
necessary for the Authorization part. As described the API-KEY consists of username and
password divided by “:”. Please copy the key parts into the Username and Password fields.
This is everything we need to do to access our serverless function. Press send to see the
result.
The function itself looks for the “name” in the calling json so if we want to try this part of the
serverless function we can click Body, select raw, JSON(application/json) and add this very
simple json file “{“name”:”ansi”}. Then press the send button to see the result of our call.

The response is a complex json file will all kind of runtime environment and statistic
information. Very important beside the response/result value is also the start and end time.
One key feature of serverless computing is the response time. These functions are loaded
and executed very fast without costing anything while not active. So you can have thousands
of functions waiting for being called without paying a single cent. Only when an event is
triggered the function is called and you pay by TIME*RAM which can be very very low.
As a technical background information you need to know the function itself is not actively
waiting for your call. It’s stored in a database and when you call it the first time the function is
pulled from the database and wrapped in the runtime environment before it is expected. This
can take up to 300 hundred milliseconds when it’s code like python or javascript. When it is a
docker container for java or C++ or even GO it can take some time to fetch the docker
container out of a repository. But this is only the first call, all following calls are started within
some milliseconds. When a function is not called for several minutes the runtime is removed
and the following later call will take again some time.
Web access to a function
Using the API-KEY and the full REST interface is necessary when you want to use the
function with your program. Maybe you place some parts of your program in Kubernetes
some other parts in Cloud Foundry and other parts in Openwhisk. Is this case the access
need to be controlled.
But sometimes you want to expose your function to the web itself without password. In this
case you can activate the “Enable as Web Action”. In this case Openwhisk provides an URL
which can be called without any password directly from a webpage. E.g. a Formular. Try the
Public URL in your browser.

A more complex example - Cloudant Events
Now let’s do something more complex and meaningfull. For example monitor a database
and calculate some values whenever there is a new document or someone changed a
document.
Let’s go back to the “Hamburger” menu and press Functions and again the “Quickstart
Templates”.
This time we select “Cloudant Events” as the template.
As you can see this time it is more complex and there is an action sequence involved. The
first one reads data from a database and hands it over to the second one.

Beside the action sequence there is also a trigger involved. Listening to the cloudant
database for changes and starts the sequence in case of changes.
Create a database
As we want to work with a database we need to create one first. This can be done very
easily in bluemix. Select the “Create a new instance” and you will see this popup.
The “Let’s go” button brings
us to the cloudant service
request menu. Make sure
you select the right location
where you have done
everything else before and
press create.

Now we have a NoSQL database
up and running. What we need now
are the credentials to access this
database. This can be done in the
“Service credentials” on the left
side.
Gettings Database credentials
On a newly created database there are no external credentials configured. So let’s create
one by pressing “New credentials”.

Nothing special to configure so just
press “Add”.
Now we have REST credentials for
the cloudant database. Press the
little arrow down next to “View
Credentials”. These credentials we
will need later on for the trigger in
your function.
Beside the access credentials we also need a database configured. This can be done with
the Cloudant web interface. Press the “Manage” menu on the left side and then the
“LAUNCH” on the right side.
This brings is to the cloudant
dashboard. We can modify
databases, see and modify data
aso. For now we just want to add
a new database.

Create a database
This can be done
on the top right
side with “Create
Database”. This
name is also
important for the
trigger
configuration.
Back to the function window in your browser. Press “OK” on the popup.

Deploy the template
Now we can add the Username, Password, Host from the credentials window and also the
database name we created. “Deploy” will install the trigger, actions and also the sequence.
Under “Sequence” we can now see, modify and trigger our sequence.
Function code
But first let’s have a look at the code itself and find out what the “Process-Change” is doing.
As we can see it searches for “name” and “color” fields in the database document and
returns a message containing both words. So let’s create a new database document
containing these keywords.

Add a document to the database
So let’s create a new database document with these words and see what happens. Please
go back to your Cloudant dashboard window and press the Database Symbol on the left
side. (The stacked disks.)
And then select your database. Top right there is the “Create Document” button.
NoSQL databases work with
json documents. So all we
need to do is to add at least
two key-value entries like
these to the database. Please
make sure you have commas
behind each line, except the
last one.

After pressing “Create Document” we will see the document added to our database.
Monitor serverless computing
But back to the function window where we hopefully see the trigger and sequence in action.
This can be done on the left menu with “Monitor”. Under activity log there is hopefully an
entry, telling you the created message with the name and color included.
This was the function aka serverless part of the workshop. Now for a simple demo deploy in
kubernetes.

Kubernetes
OK, let’s dive right into Kubernetes. Click the IBM Cloud logo in order to get back to the main
dashboard. Here we see now the kubernetes cluster with 1 node. Click on your clustername.
Nodes
As we can see now in the overview the cluster is ready and the node is ready too.
Under worker nodes you can get more information on the workers, add more worker nodes
or delete worker nodes. Depending on your workload you can manage your servers here.

Web Apps
Like we saw in the serverless part there is
an easy way to install templates and already
existing demo approcations. Please press
the “Hamburger” menu and select “Web
Apps”.
This brings us to the
Cloud App Service
Center. Beside
information on the
command line
interface there is
also the Web part. A
perfect place to
deploy and manage
complex
applications. Please
press the “Get
Started” button
there.

Python Watson Assistant Basic
Now you see a huge variation of already
existing applications. A great start from
“Hello World” to already complex
applications. For now we select the “Python
Watson Assistant Basic” application.
As we configure now a complete project
with source code, deployment pipeline and
services we need to provide a project name
and also a hostname plus domain. Please
press “Create Project”.
Deploy project
Now our project and the requested services are configured. Let’s deploy the project now on
the cloud by
pressing
“Deploy to
Cloud”.

Here we can choose between a kubernetes and cloud foundry installation. So let’s select our
cluster and press “Create”.
Now we have the project
configured and a
deployment pipeline for
our project, including a
toolchain for change
management and
automatic deploy. Press
the “view toolchain” in
order to see how the
source code is managed
and the automatic deploy
works.

Toolchain
This is our toolchain. IBM
Cloud has a build in github
including git source
management and Issue
tracking. For now let’s
concentrate on the deliver
part of the toolchain. Simply
press the “Deliver Pipeline”
icon.
The deployment has 2 steps. The first one takes care of getting the source code and building
the docker container
and the second stage
is responsible for
deploying the
container on the
kubernetes cluster.

In order to get the URL for our active project we need to have a look at the logfiles in the
“Deploy Stage”. Please press “View logs and history”. Scroll down to the very end and check
for the URL. In this case 184.173.47.76:32590
See the demo in action
If you open this URL you can see your installation of a very simple chat bot application using
Watson services. On the left side you can chat with your car-AI and on the right side you see
the JSON object which are exchanged between your app and the Watson conversation
service.

Kubernetes Dashboard
Now let’s see how the application is installed on kubernetes. Let’s go back to the main
dashboard and then to your cluster. On the top right is the “Kubernetes Dashboard” button.
This opens a new window the the official kubernetes dashboard.
Here you can get all information about your cluster, the installed applications, the services
within kube and a lot of other stuff.

For now we concentrate on the installed application. This is managed in a “Pod”.
Kubernetes yaml file
If you want to see the configuration and the deployment yaml files there is a “Edit” button on
top right of your dashboard.

Now let’s see how easy it is to chance the application
code and see the deployment pipeline in action. First
we need to go back to our DevOps pipeline. The
easiest path is via the “Hamburger” menu, then
DepOps, ToolChains and then your project.

Orion - the build-in editor
This time we use the web based online Editor “Orion”
This brings us directly to our source code. The landing page just show you the README.md
file of your project. What we want to do now is to chance one line in the CSS file. This file
can be found by opening the source code tree on the left side.

The CSS file is located at public / css. Please change the line 118 in app.css “color: “ to
whatever color you like.

Repositor code checkin
Now we changed to source code and need to check it in into our repository. The build in
version manager can be found on the left side. Directly under the edit icon. First we need to
commit our change by adding a comment and pressing the “Commit” button and then we
can push our changes to the repository with the sync button on the left side.
After syncing the repository manager should report “Nothing to commit”

Now back to our
deployment pipeline. Here
we see the first stage has
picked up the changes and
rebuild the container.
See your application in action
As soon as the second stage is finished we can reload our application in the other browser
window. No Watsons anser has changed from white to your selected color.

Now as a final step, let’s have a look at the underlying watson service. If you open the main
IBM cloud dashboard you see there is a new service called “Watson Assistant”, press it in
order to open the detailed information page. At the Manage page you see the “Open tool”
button. Please press it.
The Watson Assistant
The Watson Assistant is a very powerful but also complex service. Just let’s have a very very
short impression. Please press the Workspaces button to see the existing workspaces.

The Workspace we used is the “Car Dashboard sample”.
Intents
Every Conversation consists if 3 parts. The First one is the “Intents”, basically what is the
intention a conversation has.

Entities
The second one are the entities which we may encounter in our conversation.

Conversation Flow
And the last one is the conversation flow. For example if we ask to switch on music the
system does not know what kind of music so the conversation service ask for the genre
before the underlying business code can switch on the radio.
This is the end of this tutorial. Ufffffff. I hope you had some fun and learned how to use
Kubernetes and Serverless in the IBM Cloud. For sure this was a rough ride and only on the
surface but I can be used as a starter to a fantastic journey. If you have more questions the
documentation which you can always find on the top right corner is very detailed and
explains both the high level part but also the low level API access parts.

Serverless and Kubernetes Workshop on IBM Cloud

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