IBM Cloud Code Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform where IBM manages the entire infrastructure, including servers, networking, and runtime environments. This aligns perfectly with the client’s requirement to eliminate operational overhead for OS/middleware and allows developers to focus exclusively on code. While Kubernetes Service offers container orchestration, it still requires cluster management. Virtual Servers and Bare Metal require full infrastructure management by the client.

IBM Cloud Direct Link provides a private, dedicated network connection between a client’s on-premises infrastructure and IBM Cloud, bypassing the public internet. This ensures security, predictable performance, and lower latency. VPN for VPC encrypts traffic but still uses the public internet as the transport. Transit Gateway connects VPCs and networks within IBM Cloud, and Load Balancer distributes traffic, neither of which creates a direct physical link to on-premises.

Transient (spot) instances in IBM Cloud are ideal for interruptible, fault-tolerant workloads like development/testing that run on a predictable schedule. They offer significant cost savings (up to 80% off pay-as-you-go) and can be combined with automation tools to start/stop on a schedule. Pay-as-you-go for 24/7 instances is costly. Term billing locks in a monthly cost for constant use. Suspended instances are not a standard billing model.

IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Crypto Services provides Keep Your Own Key (KYOK) capabilities, where encryption keys are generated and stored in a dedicated, single-tenant Hardware Security Module (HSM) that is controlled exclusively by the client. IBM has no access to the keys, meeting the strictest compliance requirements. Key Protect is a managed service, but IBM manages the underlying infrastructure. BYOK with Key Protect allows client-provided keys but they are still stored in an IBM-managed service. Server-side encryption with IBM-managed keys does not meet the client ownership requirement.

A Warm Standby architecture maintains a scaled-down but fully functional version of the application always running in the secondary region. This configuration can typically meet an RTO of hours and an RPO of minutes (as data is replicated asynchronously), aligning well with the stated objectives. Active-Active is for near-zero RTO/RPO but is more complex/costly. Pilot Light has a longer RTO (only core services run). Backup and Restore has the longest RTO/RPO, often measured in hours or days.

In IKS, a ClusterIP service exposes pods on an internal IP address reachable only within the cluster network, making the backend private. The frontend pods, being in the same cluster, can communicate with this internal service. The frontend can then be exposed to the internet using an Ingress controller or a LoadBalancer service type. A public LoadBalancer or public IPs for the backend would violate the requirement. Pod placement on nodes does not control network accessibility.

IBM Cloud Monitoring (part of IBM Cloud Observability) is the service designed for infrastructure and application metrics. It can collect system metrics (like CPU) from VPC instances and allows you to define alerting policies based on thresholds (85%) and durations (10 minutes) that will trigger notifications. Activity Tracker is for audit logs. Log Analysis is for log data. Schematics is for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) management.

IBM Cloud Functions is IBM’s implementation of Apache OpenWhisk, a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform. It is inherently event-driven and serverless, executing code only in response to events (like IoT messages). It scales automatically, including down to zero active instances when idle, which optimizes cost for sporadic workloads. While Code Engine can run event-driven workloads, its primary scaling model for applications is not strictly down to zero as quickly as Functions. Virtual Servers and Kubernetes require proactive capacity management.

The Shared Responsibility Model divides security and compliance tasks between IBM and the customer. For a managed database service, IBM is responsible for the security *of* the cloud (physical infrastructure, hypervisor, managed service patching). The customer is responsible for security *in* the cloud, which includes configuring their data, applications, identity and access management (like database user controls), and network-level security (like database firewall rules). Patching the DB engine and hardware maintenance are IBM’s responsibilities in this model.

IBM Cloud Code Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform where IBM manages the entire infrastructure, including servers, networking, and runtime environments. This aligns perfectly with the client’s requirement to eliminate operational overhead for OS/middleware and allows developers to focus exclusively on code. While Kubernetes Service offers container orchestration, it still requires cluster management. Virtual Servers and Bare Metal require full infrastructure management by the client.0