Tag: ibm cloud functions

When working with serverless actions, often we'll still need to access some sort of service, whether it's object storage, a database, or whatever. Here's a quick overview of how this works for IBM Cloud Functions (plus some gotchas ....)

I work quite a bit with serverless tech, particularly on IBM Cloud since I work there. At the moment I'm building a microservice using web actions. When a user creates data with a POST request, I want to redirect them to the URL of the new thing they created - but for that I need to know the URL that it was accessed with. This is a relatively new feature on API Gateway so here's a quick howto for grabbing that URL in both JavaScript and PHP.

One of the best features of CouchDB is its change feed which allows us to get a feed of the changes happening on our database. It's also possible to have a serverless function (examples are for IBM Cloud Functions but should also work for Apache OpenWhisk) that fires in response to activity on that change feed. I have a database of events that I want to react to when they happen, but the change feed doesn't include the actual document that was added - but you can add one of the built-in functions to a sequence to make that happen. This post will show how to achieve this by wiring up a built-in action to fetch the document with another action of our own that then handles the data.

Did you know you can serverless with PHP? OK, so serverless is clearly not a verb, but since I love serverless tech and have also loved PHP for longer than I'm going to admit (the dates of the earliest posts on this blog might serve as a clue), using these technologies together is definitely my idea of a good time.

I included an example of a serverless endpoint to receive incoming webhooks in my talk at PHPUK last week and I got a few questions about it so I thought I'd share that example in written form.