Step 2: Create a Service on IBM Cloud
A five-minute lab to create an use IBM Cloud
Last updated
Was this helpful?
A five-minute lab to create an use IBM Cloud
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Creating services on IBM Cloud is easy, and we have over a hundred different types of services you can create. To see the full list, visit (or visit if you'd like to see our experimental 🧪 features!)
For today's lab, we'll create and run a Visual Recognition service within five minutes.
First, let's find the Visual Recognition service inside the IBM Cloud resource list. We'll search for visual:
Click on Visual Recognition.
On the service creation page, make sure the Lite plan is selected, and click the blue Create button:
This service is free, but it will be removed after 30 days of inactivity.
Now, let's retrieve our service credentials so that we can classify an image. Click on Service Credentials on the left hand menu:
At the bottom of the page, click View Credentials
Take note of the apikey and url parameters; we will use them in step 2d.
Now that you've created your service, let's ping it using a separate environment. Although we could do it from our local machine, IBM has a great tool for us called the Cloud Shell.
In the upper right hand corner of your IBM Cloud Dashboard, you'll see a small terminal icon:
This is your IBM Cloud Shell. We'll be able to use this shell to ping our newly-created service.
This is the command we'll execute in the cloud shell to test it. We'll replace {apikey} and {url} with the parameters from our IBM Cloud Visual Recognition service, and {image_url} with a publicly-available image that we'd like to analyze.
Execute this command, and we'll get a JSON response showing the default classifier's analysis of the image. Good job, you've created and called an IBM Watson service!
