According to a number of surveys that look at what Cloud Functions (eg. AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, Google Cloud Functions) are being used for, the number one use case is REST APIs.

The 2018 Serverless Survey from The New Stack showed that 73% of respondents were building “HTTP REST APIs and web applications”:

Whilst the use of Cloud Functions provides a number of advantages, including being able to rapidly build and deploy code to clouds without having to deal with building, deploying, configuring and scaling servers, one of its challenges is that the APIs that you have to code to lack the domain specific focus and rich library ecosystem that you get from web and microservice frameworks. …

In the previous article: “Build a new Cloud Native Express.js app with Appsody”, you learned how to use Appsody to build an Express.js app that inherits a set of cloud-native capabilities from the Appsody Stack.

In this article, you’ll see how to take an existing Express.js app, and make it cloud-native by enabling it to work with the same nodejs-expressAppsody Stack.

Pre-requisites

In order to follow this tutorial, you’ll need to install the Apposdy CLI, which also requires you to have Docker installed, along with the Express.js application you want to make cloud-native with Appsody.

Install the Appsody CLI

Before getting started, you’ll need to install the Appsody CLI. …

The use of Appsody’s tools and provided Stacks greatly simplies the steps and knowledge required to build “cloud packaged”, “cloud native” and “cloud functions” based applications.

Appsody’s nodejs-express Stack makes it easy to go beyond making an application “cloud packaged” (which you can see how to do with the basic nodejs Appsody Stack), to creating “cloud native” applications which exploit the capabilities of the cloud platform by providing features such as additional built-in “Cloud Native” capabilities such as liveness and readiness, and metrics and observability..

In the following post, you’ll see how to create a new cloud-native Express.js …

The use of Appsody’s tools and provided Stacks greatly simplifies the steps and knowledge required to build “cloud packaged”, “cloud native” and “cloud functions” based applications.

Appsody’s nodejs Stack makes it easy to take any existing Node.js application and make it “cloud packaged”.

In the following post, you’ll see how to take a sample Node.js application, and package it into a best-practise container image using the Appsody CLI and the nodejsStack.

Pre-requisites

In order to follow this tutorial, you’ll need to install the Appsody CLI, which also requires you to have Docker installed, along with a Node.js application to cloud package.

Install the Appsody CLI
Before getting started, you’ll need to install the Appsody CLI. …

Appsody provides a set of open source tools and capabilities that simplifies the process of building and deploying applications to Kubernetes that are not just cloud packaged, but that are also cloud native.

To do that, Appsody provides three components:

• Appsody CLI
• Appsody Stacks
• Appsody Deploy

Appsody CLI

The Appsody CLI provides commands that implement the full development lifecycle. This spans the ability to create a new or enable an existing application using init , to then run, test, and debug, and finally to build an image and deploy it to Kubernetes.

All of this occurs in a continuous, local containerized environment. This means that, regardless of your development machine’s operating system, you can immediately verify, test and debug your application in a containerized environment that closely matches your target deployment environment. …

Whether modernizing existing applications or building new cloud native microservices, cloud based applications are increasingly composed of components built using multiple programming languages and frameworks. This is why IBM Cloud Private now includes service and support for the open source Java, Node.js and Swift runtimes along with select web and microservice frameworks, enabling you to build out best-practice architecture patterns:

This further enhances the value provided by IBM Cloud Private by expanding the range of applications and workloads that can be deployed to it with the guarantee of enterprise levels of support. This new support is included with the 2.1.0.3 …