A phased approach using a serverless platform like IBM Cloud Code Engine allows the client to containerize and modernize critical pieces of the application incrementally. This reduces initial risk and cost, provides immediate scalability benefits for specific components, and aligns with a practical, real-world strategy for gradual modernization rather than a risky, all-at-once rewrite or a simple lift-and-shift that doesn’t address their goals.

IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is the foundational networking service that provides the software-defined network within a region. It inherently includes subnets that can be provisioned in specific zones. Deploying resources in subnets across different zones within the same VPC provides built-in, private, low-latency connectivity, forming the basis for a highly available architecture. The other services manage external traffic, cross-region connectivity, or hybrid connections.

IBM Cloudant is a fully managed JSON document database based on Apache CouchDB. It is specifically designed for flexible schema (storing data as JSON documents), offers built-in high availability and disaster recovery through data distribution, and scales automatically. While other options are capable, Cloudant is the premier choice for document-oriented, schema-flexible workloads on IBM Cloud.

IBM Event Streams (a managed Apache Kafka service) is ideal for ingesting and durably storing high-volume event streams. IBM Cloud Functions (a serverless FaaS platform) can be triggered by messages from Event Streams to execute code in response to each event, enabling real-time processing, analytics, and alerting without managing servers. This is a classic, scalable, event-driven architecture on IBM Cloud.

IBM Cloud Satellite allows the client to deploy and run consistent IBM Cloud services (like containers, AI, and data) in their own on-premises infrastructure or other environments. This creates a hybrid cloud where developers can use cloud-native tools and APIs while the sensitive data physically remains in the controlled, on-premises location, meeting the data residency requirement.

Access groups are a core IAM feature designed to simplify policy management. Instead of assigning access policies individually to dozens or hundreds of users and service IDs, you add them to an access group and then attach the necessary policies to the group itself. This follows security best practices and greatly reduces administrative overhead as team roles change.

IBM Watson Visual Recognition allows you to train custom classifiers. By uploading your labeled dataset of part images (both good and defective), you can create a custom model that learns to identify the specific defects relevant to your manufacturing process. The other services are for speech, text analysis, and conversational AI, not custom image classification.

In IBM Cloud VPC, block storage volumes have an independent lifecycle from virtual server instances. Deleting an instance does not automatically delete volumes attached to it unless explicitly selected during deletion. The volume persists as an unattached resource and continues to incur charges. The corrective action is to locate the unused volume in the IBM Cloud console and delete it to stop the billing.

IBM Cloud Code Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform. Its core benefit is complete abstraction of servers, clusters, and infrastructure. Developers simply submit their source code or container image, and Code Engine handles building, deploying, and auto-scaling—including scaling down to zero active instances when there is no traffic, which optimizes cost.

A phased approach using a serverless platform like IBM Cloud Code Engine allows the client to containerize and modernize critical pieces of the application incrementally. This reduces initial risk and cost, provides immediate scalability benefits for specific components, and aligns with a practical, real-world strategy for gradual modernization rather than a risky, all-at-once rewrite or a simple lift-and-shift that doesn’t address their goals.0