Watson Studio project restriction for collaborators

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When we create a Watson Studio project, we should pay attention on the collaborator restriction! We cannot change it later.

This is just a blog post about a common pitfall for new Watson Studio users , when they are creating a new Watson Studio project.

The step five in the documentation of the project creation tells us about restrict who can be a collaborator for our project. This configuration has a huge impact for our user access management later, by just checking this small box.

watson-studio-restiction

Step five says:  “Select the Restrict who can be a collaborator check box to restrict collaborators to members of your organization or integrate with a catalog. The check box is selected by default if you are a member of a catalog. You can’t change this setting after you create the project.”

This is not the end of the world, we can easily create new projects, and configure them. Even I would say, this is a good opportunity to get familiar with the user management of IBM Cloud anyway.

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How to create an interactive YouTube Video selection in VUE

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In this blog post I want to share my observations during my implementation of an interactive YouTube Video selection in VUE. Maybe this can save you some time, if you plan to do the same.

Let’s start with my motivation, it came from the improvements of the #BlueCloudMirror game UI. We decided to provide the #BlueCloudMirror users a recorded YouTube LiveStream of us. This video provides an awesome overview of our  major technologies.

The video takes approximately 50 minutes. This is a long time to watch, so we want to provide the user a new interactive architecture page, as you can see below. A user should have the ability to select the topic he is interested in. To do this, we needed the position selection for the YouTube video. In the gif you can see the result.

vue-youtube-selection

Topics of this blog post:

  • How to define dynamic values in a VUE template
  • How to configure autostart for YouTube videos
  • How to avoid SAMEORI problem with the YouTube video

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Cors and Node-RED using a simple forwarding server

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When you use Node-RED on IBM Cloud during hackathons you will notice REST calls in flows cannot be directly invoked from a web application. The reason for this is mostly that cors (cross-origin resource sharing) is not enabled for the Node-RED server. This blog post is a simple workaround for this problem.

By the way, you can use the IBM Cloud for free, if you simply create an IBM Lite account. Here you only need an e-mail address.

I developed this workaround to have full control and be very flexible during a hackathon, when using Node-RED for prototyping and building integrations to services and web-applications, without changing Node-RED settings or using cors browser enabler.

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Being @Hacknext a Hackathon and Conference to create impact in InsurTech

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I was one of the coaches at the sold out Hacknext in Munich, hosted at Kohlebunker, from  7. March – 9. March 2019 and in this blog post I want to share my personal impressions.

From my point of view it was great to see: young people build relevant solutions for the future with the latest technologies on cloud.
Best wishes to all hackers who attended and every success for the future.

IMG_6066.JPG

Hacknext  includes a hackathon and conference related to the insurance business called InsurTech.

In other words the hackers, attendees and coaches were spending three days in the Kohlebunker for:

  • Taking on challenges together, approximately 110 hackers organized into 20 teams
  • Benefiting from professional exchange on InsurTech with approximately 60 conference attendees
  • Providing valuable support from the API coaches

The challenges

Each of the hacker teams had to address a minimum of one of these challenges:

  • Using smart data and its benefits for insurance
  • Building the future of digital bancassurance
  • (R)evolutioning of the insurance agent
  • Rethinking retirement

In the following YouTube video you get a short impression of the great atmosphere at the hacknext:

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How to deploy a container to the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service

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I want to describe another way to run the  Highscores-Service of the #BlueCloudMirror game . In the game I use  IBM Cloud Foundry apps, now I want to explore IBM Cloud Kubernetes.

Note: The #BlueCloudMirror game we  @Niklas, @Harald and I made, is available as an Pattern on IBM Developer.

The first step was creating a container for the Highscores-Service,  which I described in my blog post how to build a container.

In this post I deploy my scores-service container to the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service.  This is  not a blueprint for IBM Kubernetes deployments, if you looking for a blueprint,  just take a look here. IBM Cloud documentation contains a great guide for getting started:  How to setup and use IBM Cloud Kubernetes

I share my experiences and observations with you, along with my deployment.

Let’s start with an overview of the topics I touch in this blog post:

Simplified Architecture 

kube-basic-architecture

The above picture shows a simplified architecture for the scores-service inside Kubernetes. You can see the relevant elements for the deployment. If you are interested in the details of  these elements, just click on the linked Kubernetes documentation.

The major elements:

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How to build a container

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I want to describe another way to run the  Highscores-Service of the #BlueCloudMirror game . In the game I use  IBM Cloud Foundry apps, now I want to explore IBM Cloud Kubernetes.

Note: The #BlueCloudMirror game we  @Niklas, @Harald and I made, is available as an Pattern on IBM Developer.

Let’s get started with the first step, building a container which contains the Scores-Service using Docker .

This blog post is all about building and running a docker container on a local machine.

Topics you will find in this post: my experience of  learning how configure a Dockerfile along  with my creation of the Dockerfile for the score-service, including following steps:

  • Choosing the base image
  • Installing the needed packaging tools
  • Defining the source code location and copying the source code into the container
  • Configuring a new user and group for Bower , a package manager
  • Setting up the Score-Service
  • Running the Score-Service container locally

Note: This is not a blueprint, this is just how I did it and I share my experience with you.

Architecture of the Scores-Service

This is the relevant architecture for building the Docker container.  The Scores-Service UI and the Scores Core Service will run in the Docker container locally. The Cloudant service still runs on IBM Cloud.

scores-service-docker

 

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How to prepare for a Hackathon with IBM Cloud?

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Today I want to address a common situation for developers: You want to participate in a hackathon, and you plan to use IBM Cloud, but you have never used it before. How to prepare?
My motivation to write this: I did support the hacknext hackathon from 7-9 March 2019 in Munich as a coach. (http://ibm.biz/ibm4hacknext) and now I will support the  hackbay hackathon from 4-5 April 2019 in Nuernberg  as a coach.

IBM Cloud provides a huge amount of different services, runtimes, and so on.
BTW (by the way): From my point of view, one of the most important objectives in a hackathon is, running your created application live! To do this you need a runtime 😉

Let’s start with the basics

Let’s get a basic understanding of what the major areas in IBM Cloud are and where to find how to’s?

IBM Cloud offers a good entry point with the getting started page , which is organized into these different topics:

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#BlueCloudMirror Game – highscores

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I am a part of the team along with @Niklas and @Harald , who created and developed the fun Blue Cloud Mirror Game. 

game

This is my first blog  about this topic, and I will follow with future posts to detail the different parts of highscores (scores) and the technologies and components involved.

You can also take a look at other existing information:

The motivation for the highscores (scores)

If you play a game, you usually want to compare yourself with others. To do this, you simply have to save scoring information somewhere and provide access for the players who want to see the highscores, even if they do not play the game.

The high-level architecture overview on scores

The objective was to implement this on the cloud with state-of-the-art runtimes, services, security topics, to cover microservices, and to have an easy scalable cloud architecture.
I developed the scores part and the functions-api for users.

scores-architecture

The Game, Scores Service UI and the Highscores webapp are hosted on different runtimes and for the execution they will be loaded into a browser.

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Cloud Foundry on top of Kubernetes @IBM Cloud – a small test

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This blog is related to the topics Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment , serverless , code patterns and the IBM Coder Program.

I just want to move an existing Cloud Foundry app on IBM Cloud to the new IBM Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment,which instantiates Cloud Foundry on top of Kubernetes. You can find more details about this IBM Cloud offering in this blog post “An on-demand, single-tenant Platform-as-a-Service on IBM Cloud” from IBM.

Motivation

Maybe you noticed the section Combined Power in my blog post Operations and Developers side by side @“Continuous Lifecycle” and “Container Conf” related to Simon Moser’s session “CF3 – Combining the Power of Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes” ? In this blog post you can read more about the motivation to combine the power.  Also you can find out which open source projects ( eirini for example) are relevant.

Based on  Simon Moser´s speech, I was motivated to check out the Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment on IBM Cloud.

I started my test of moving an existing Could Foundry App. I have chosen to move the app instance from one of my modified code patterns . My selection was the Predictive Industrial Visual Analysis. This code pattern has a big focus on serverless, but I will write more about the serverless part in the near future.

Let’s get started: How do I move an existing Cloud Foundry app?

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