IBM Cloud Functions is a service provided by IBM Cloud. It is powered by Apache OpenWhisk; actually, it's IBM who donated OpenWhisk to the Apache Foundation. We have a chapter dedicated to OpenWhisk later in this book.
The Cloud Functions service provided by IBM is, of course, very similar to other function services in terms of concepts. Functions wrap around the application business logic and run in the event-driven FaaS environment managed by IBM.
Functions are designed to respond to a direct HTTP invocation from other Web or mobile apps, or to events triggered by other supported systems, for example, Cloudant. IBM Cloud provides Cloudant, a commercially supported JSON data store built on top of CouchDB. We can prepare a trigger in the Cloudant system, and let it fire events to invoke functions defined in the IBM Cloud Functions, when the data...
