IBM announced that companies across a range of industries, including one of the world’s top banks, Santander Group, are designing and testing new apps with Bluemix OpenWhisk, IBM’s event-driven and open serverless computing platform. IBM is also releasing new OpenWhisk features designed to help developers rapidly debug code, more tightly integrate with third party tools, and adopt a broader range of programming languages.
IBM is expanding and tightening integrations with the growing ecosystem surrounding OpenWhisk, which offers an open, non-proprietary engine. By building OpenWhisk with open standards from the ground up and rooting its code in active developer communities, such as Apache, IBM aims to grow the range of capabilities developers can instantly access. An open serverless platform also provides freedom to choose where apps can run.
Available on Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform, OpenWhisk acts as an underlying force within apps, binding together relevant events and triggers, such as the uploading of an image or the clicking of a mouse. When triggered by such events, OpenWhisk automatically taps advanced cloud services as needed, such as cognitive intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), analytics and more. This design essentially renders traditional cloud infrastructure invisible, enabling developers to focus on writing code instead of configuring servers.
Since the launch of OpenWhisk on Bluemix, IBM has continued to add new features for developers. With the general availability of OpenWhisk, these services include:instant debugging for NodeJS, Python and Swift actions; integration with MessageHub, a Bluemix-hosted Apache Kafka service for real-time build outs of data pipelines and streaming apps;support for new run times such as Java, Node v6, Python and Swift v3;an extension for Visual Studio Code; and,a new and improved user interface to simplify browser-based development and testing.
“Developers are turning to the cloud for efficiency, but they also want choice,” said Bill Karpovich, general manager, IBM Cloud. “Since we’ve built OpenWhisk with open standards, it’s able to not only help resolve many problems associated with server management, but also gives developers the flexibility to pull in outside tools and data and run code wherever they choose.”