Introduction to the IBM Stock Trader sample The IBM Stock Trader application is a simple stock trading sample, where you can create various stock portfolios and add shares of stock to each for a commission. It keeps track of each portfolio’s total value and its loyalty level, notifying you of changes in level, which affect the commission charged per transaction. It also lets you submit feedback on the application, which can result in earning free (zero commission) trades, based on the tone of the feedback. (Tone is determined by calling the Watson Tone Analyzer, which will be covered in a futu ..read more

Blockchain is a shared, replicated immutable ledger for recording transactions, tracking assets, and building trust. An asset can be tangible (for example, a house or a car) or intangible (for example, intellectual property or patents). Blockchain is built on properties like consensus, provenance, immutability, finality. In a traditional business scenario, a transaction that involves multiple organizations is recorded differently by each business. If two organizations disagree on the state of a transaction, then a dispute occurs, which can often be costly and time consuming to resolve. Blockch ..read more

I am an Egeria maintainer at IBM. If you would like to look up what code I have written, my GitHub ID is davidradl. Many thanks to Nigel Jones for reviewing this content. Nigel is also an Egeria maintainer at IBM. What is Egeria? Egeria is an open source project under LF AI & Data that provices open metadata and governance for enterprises. It automatically captures, manages, and exchanges metadata between tools and platforms in a vendor-neutral way. From the Egeria documentation: “Although it is desirable to synchronize metadata between the tools and platforms used by an organization, ther ..read more

Today, IBM joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Knative community in welcoming Knative as the newest incubating project to the umbrella open source organization. This important milestone is crucial for the future of Knative and the CNCF. As mentioned in a previous blog post, by joining the CNCF, the Knative community gains a vibrant open source organization which allows it to grow and gain more users. By accepting Knative as an incubating project, the CNCF gains a project that extends, simplifies, and enhances the Kubernetes platform for serverless and event-driven worklo ..read more

Change management can be a useful risk mitigation tool and has evolved to be a core component of cloud-native application development processes. However, it comes with its own set of challenges to track all changes, assess change impact, and follow a backout plan if unforeseen issues crop up. Most importantly, you must preserve evidence for an audit to ensure traceability of the changes. In highly regulated industries, such as financial services, organizations trying to leverage cloud technologies must put a lot of investment into traceability and audit compliance. With years of deep security ..read more

What is serverless? Serverless is a deployment model that allows applications to be built and run without requiring an understanding of the infrastructure in which they are deployed. The serverless platform is simple to use and easily accessible to everyone. Developers can concentrate more on software development if they don’t have to worry about infrastructure. Introducing Red Hat OpenShift Serverless Red Hat OpenShift Serverless streamlines the process of delivering code from development to production by eliminating the need for developers to understand the underlying architecture or manage ..read more

Some of the key factors that are important for system administrators during system maintenance are how long it takes to apply system patches or updates that require a reboot and how fast the system resources can be reconfigured without disrupting the existing workloads. Boot time is an important component of system performance as users must wait for the boot operation to complete before they can use the device. It is the time taken for a device to be ready to operate after the power has been turned on. Slow boot times would make the system owners to refuse to apply any patches or updates that ..read more

Subscriber and Subscription Management (SSM) is the system that funnels orders for IBM SaaS offerings offered through IBM and third-party marketplaces to the appropriate endpoints. This provisions orders for the customers and manages their entire subscriber and subscription lifecycle. It handles about 2,000 requests per hour. SSM is a legacy monolith app. However, dealing with such a mission-critical application with millions of lines of code can be a nightmare. Making it more complex is the transaction handling implemented at every smallest service layer unit. To support high-end business use ..read more

When firefighters arrive on the scene of a fire, they often have only seconds to decide where to focus their attention to save the most lives. Visibility may be low and they may not have enough information about who is in a building or where they are located. How could technology be applied to help these everyday heroes make better split-second decisions? The Call for Code Honoring Everyday Heroes Challenge asked participants to develop new technology solutions to address challenges faced by first responders, delivery personnel, childcare workers, healthcare frontline workers, educators, and m ..read more

As machine learning practitioners, we invest significant time and effort to improve our models. You usually do it iteratively and experimentally by repeatedly changing your model, running an experiment, and examining the results, then deciding whether the recent model change was positive and should be kept or discarded. Changes in each iteration might involve, for example, changing a value for a hyperparameter, adding a new input feature, changing the underlying machine learning model (for example, by using gradient boosting classification instead of random forest classification), trying a new ..read more