Month: February 2019

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 blog post is: I support some hackathons as a coach for IBM Cloud PaaS:

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 . That starting page was organized before into these different topics:

  • Develop and deploy
    Build your apps, deploy, and scale them with IBM Cloud.
  • Cognitive with Watson
    Build cloud-based exploration applications powered by Watson.
  • IoT platform
    Manage your devices, visualize data and perform analytics on real-time data.
  • Data science and data management
    Uncover insights hidden in the data and influence your business.
  • Training
  • Support

I like that overview above, because it gives you an awesome brief overview of major capabilities you get with IBM Cloud. Now the page organized in these major chapters:

  • Master the basics: 10-minute tutorials

  • Advance your skills

  • Cloud essentials

  • Dig into developer tools

  • Learn how IBM Cloud works

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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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