Weather Underground’s Serverless approach to modernizing Intellicast radar maps using OpenWhisk Composer

For any company, there will always be technical debts that you have to deal with as technology evolves. Whether it’s revamping a site, refactoring or optimizing an application, or adding new features, you always want to find new and better ways to make improvements. The Weather Company spent a better part of this year on modernizing our Weather Underground website specifically the radar maps feature of Intellicast.

You might want to consider serverless architecture if you’re interested in reducing the cost of development and operations for your next project. Serverless architecture is based on a cloud computing execution model, it is driven by events, and its resources are dynamically managed and automatically scaled by the cloud providers. A serverless framework could potentially free up your time, because you won’t need to maintain, debug, and monitor your own infrastructure.

I wrote an article on IBM Developer that describes one of our use cases for Weather Underground. We applied serverless architecture using IBM Cloud Functions, based on Apache OpenWhisk, and advantaging the Apache OpenWhisk Composer programming model to modernize an existing product offering. You can read more here.