IBM Makes Deploying Cloud Pak for Integration on AWS Easier

Source:-https://containerjournal.com

IBM has made available Quick Start for IBM Cloud Pak for Integration based on the Red Hat OpenShift platform on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Savio Rodrigues, vice president for integration and application platform offering management for IBM, says the Quick Start capability that IBM added to its Cloud Pak for Integration offering makes it easier possible to deploy IBM middleware encapsulated in containers on the AWS cloud.

Announced at the ongoing online AWS re:Invent conference, the Quick Start capability that IBM created is already available for IBM Cloud, with support for other clouds such as Microsoft Azure planned. Quick Start gives IT teams a set of best practices for deploying a set of IBM middleware that spans everything from application programming interface (API) integration and application data integration to messaging, event-driven publish/subscribe tools and file-transfer capabilities.

Rodrigues says it’s now apparent cloud computing is by definition hybrid. As such, IT teams will need a federated approach to integration that leverages the same middleware running on multiple clouds.

At the foundation of the IBM middleware strategy is an instanced of Red Hat OpenShift based on Kubernetes that can be deployed anywhere. IT organizations need platforms such as IBM Cloud Pak for Integration to better manage all the microservices that make up a cloud-native computing environment, he notes.

IT teams will also be able to more flexibly deploy a mix of applications constructed using microservices alongside legacy monolithic applications that can access the same middleware capabilities enabled by IBM, Rodrigues says.

In addition, IT teams will be able to flexibly manage varying service levels by controlling application traffic flows across between API endpoints, he says. As cloud-native applications become more distributed, Rodrigues notes that level of control will enable IT teams to meet service level agreements (SLAs) spanning different classes of cloud-native applications.

In addition, IT teams will be able to map dependencies between microservices more easily, he says.

IBM is positioning IBM Cloud Pak for Integration as a complement to the open source Istio service mesh it created in collaboration with Google and Lyft. IBM Cloud Pak for Integration will be able to, for example, invoke Istio as a security gateway that validates whether a specific microservice should be trusted, says Rodrigues.

Over time, he notes, IBM also plans to apply machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence to make it easier to manage increasingly complex IT environments consisting of hundreds, possibly even thousands, of microservices.

IBM is not the only provider of integration software that views the rise of microservices based on containers as a major new opportunity. However, the company is fairly far down the path toward making integration software available that runs natively on Kubernetes clusters.

It may take some time for the bulk of organizations to deploy the number of microservices that would justify an investment in IBM Cloud Pak for Integration. However, it’s now more a question of when that middleware will be needed rather than if.