emckean / serverless-for-managers-lab

Lab instructions for Serverless for Managers (originally THINK 2018 Lab 5790A)

serverless-for-managers-lab

Lab instructions for serverless lab (originally THINK 2018 Lab 5790A)

Looking for the PDF of the talk itself? It's here.

Goal

In this lab, you will:

* Create a serverless function
* Check your function's logs
* Delete or suspend your function

Prerequisites

You need an IBM Cloud account! Sign up for one with this link https://ibm.biz/BdZTG4.

Instructions

Signing in:

1. Visit https://www.ibm.com/cloud/ in your browser.

2. Click on the "person" icon in the upper-right-hand corner:

3. Choose "sign in" from the drop-down menu:

4. Click on "My cloud console" and choose "Dashboard":

Creating a Function

1. Find the menu in the upper left-hand corner:
2. Click on the menu and choose "Functions":
3. Click the "Start Creating" button:
4. Choose "Create Action":
5. Give your action a name: and click the "Create" button.
6. See your code!
7. Invoke your code by clicking the "Invoke" buttom: NOTE: if you get a "Not found" message, add a blank line at the end of your code block, save, and invoke again.
8. Check out the results of your activation!

Using an Input Parameter

Cloud functions accept a single parameter, a JSON object called params in our function here.

Update your function code to say "Hello " and your name by changing line 11 to read:

return { message: 'Hello, ' + params.name}

Then click on "Change Input" in the function header:

And enter your name as a parameter called name:

{"name": "Erin"}

Click "Apply".

Click "Invoke" again and you should see an output that looks like this:

Adding Logs

You can add logging statements to your function very simply. To test this, add console.log("This is a log message.") to your function:

Save and Invoke your function and you should see this output:

Note that the timestamp and the type of log (stdout) are included automatically.

You can see full Kibana logs for all your function invocations by clicking "Logs" in the sidebar:

This will take you to a full Kibana dashboard (it make take a minute or so to load):

Adding a Web Endpoint

It's very simple to make your function a public web endpoint!

From the Action sidebar, click on Endpoints:

Click "Enable as Web Action" and Save:

Copy and paste the string under "URL" by clicking on the copy icon:

Open a new tab in your browser, and paste in your url. You should see something like this:

You won't see your name, because you didn't pass a parameter called name to your function.

Add ?name=Erin (or your name, of course) to the end of your URL and refresh. Your output should now include your name:

Deleting Your Function

Navigate to the Actions overview dashboard and choose 'Delete Action' from the dropdown menu: