There is a painting technique called ‘pointillism’, which uses small individual dots of colour to build up the overall painting image. One of the most well-known works in this style is by Georges Seurat: A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. If you are only looking at a single dot, you miss the big picture and don’t get any sense of the part each dot plays.
When building integrations, a development team would be concerned with the need to build an individual integration such as a single API, or an individual integration flow. Another team might think about specific business events to share more widely with other development teams as the events happen. And yet another development team would design a specific message to be transferred between 2 applications. The developer building APIs or other integrations are all simply trying to address a specific need. But they are likely unaware of the extent to which their single integration is addressing a bigger business need.
Every integration is part of a larger end-to-end integration solution. Think of how the business invoicing system will be critical to how a business functions. Query the status of an invoice. Send a notification when an invoice is sent or changes state. Create an invoice without failures or duplication. Integration is needed to move data from where it is generated to where it is going to be consumed. And each task is essential, but without all the tasks, and all the integrations working together, there isn’t a business solution.
How to solve the problem of build and deploying a whole end-to-end integration solution, made up of multiple individual integrations? If done separately for each integration as part of each separate integration product, the work will be manual, highly repetitive and risk errors in every task, as well as the potential errors and discrepancies with updates or with move from dev, to test, to production. In addition, with so many separate integrations and steps, there is no overall vision or plan, and no governance or control. Instead of a defined, planned and managed deployment, the business has a complex confused tangle of integrations.
And that’s without even thinking about some of the additional aspects required in a complete deployed solution such as considering High Availability, and pre-requisites like storage, or accepting the license for each deployed component.
IBM Cloud Pak for Integration solves this problem with Integration Assemblies. What is an integration assembly? It is a single end-to-end view of multiple integrations. And it is not just a view, but all the information needed to deploy those integrations. All pulled together and stored in a single YAML file, and then deployed on Red Hat OpenShift. The business can create a single view, design and listing of all the integrations to be deployed in support of a business need. Also all the deployment information is automatically generated and assembled in a single document. As the integration assembly moves from development to test to production, there is a single managed object which can be progressed through these stages. A single place to make updates, and a single file to validate for audit.
Integration Assemblies, only available in Cloud Pak for Integration, allow you to build and manage end-to-end integration solutions simply and quickly. What otherwise might take days or weeks can be done in minutes, while at the same time providing enhanced governance and previously unavailable views of the integration solution via a powerful integration canvas.
Integration Assemblies can be designed using a graphical canvas where integration types can be moved from the palette onto the canvas and by wiring them together on the canvas all required dependencies are generated and their deployment definitions are added into the YAML file. There is a choice of creating or updating assemblies either on the canvas, in a web-form or in the YAML file itself. And wiring the integrations together in the assembly isn’t simply drawing a line between these components but is actually connecting these objects together when they are deployed with everything needed to have them work together, all done with no effort from the user.
APIs, API Products and MQ messaging deployments are even easier in Integration Assemblies thanks to declarative deployment. As Cloud Pak for Integration understands everything needed to deploy these capabilities, customers need only to include what they want as an outcome and the program will include everything necessary in the deployment definition to allow the outcome to happen.
Integration Assemblies are how Cloud Pak for Integration becomes a true enterprise-class solution for building complete integration deployments quickly and simply with a clear overall view of the integration design, powerful governance and audit, and an easy way to then have a single object in a version control system that can take advantage of DevOps and CI/CD pipelines to automate deployment in development, test and production environments.
Check out our product web page here . And find out how to get a 60 day trial of Cloud Pak for Integration here .
