Imagine the scenario for your business. You are responsible for the IT infrastructure for a prestige global business. You have locations everywhere. New York, Chicago, London, Zurich, Singapore, and your customers are likely to order, and expect results from any of your locations at any time. You have built a well-designed container-based deployment, and for assured deliver between applications you use IBM MQ to deliver messages about transactions, orders and shipments, as part of your IBM Cloud Pak for Integration deployment covering all your integration needs.
It's the middle of the busiest week of the year, and lots of orders are flowing in when disaster hits. One of your servers fails suddenly and unexpectedly. It’s running one of your MQ Servers, but you aren’t worried. You have designed your MQ Queue Managers to use MQ Native HA, providing seamless built in high availability with MQ replicating data to 2 other servers locally ensuring your business can continue even with the loss of a server. You quickly recover the server, and restart the QM manager, and you are back to full MQ operation without any downtime. None of your customers would have noticed anything.
The next day you are happy everything continues to run well. But just down the block a disaster is about to happen. The local electrical transformer bursts into flames and fails, taking out the power to several city blocks, including the whole of your data centre. All your servers shutdown. You panic for a second, but then remember you moved to the most recent release of Cloud Pak for Integration which includes IBM MQ 9.4.2, which added MQ Cross Region Replication. This recently added feature extends MQ Native HA to include asynchronous replication to a remote region, where there are another 3 MQ Queue Managers. This provides not just a replacement Native HA implementation but one which is already populated with the most current data from your main production Queue Managers in your local region. You can now rely on the MQ workload to switch over with no loss of data or transactions. This isn’t about copying data. This is about IBM MQ keeping queue managers in sync, across regions with minimal latency and no message loss.
You breathe a sigh of relief. This validated your strategy over the last couple of years of moving to containers and taking advantage of Cloud Pak for Integration. You consider all the benefits you have seen so far:
· Decoupled, isolated workloads running in containers in OpenShift, providing fine-grained scalability and easier ability to make changes in production.
· Consistent creation, deployment and operation, with Operators deploying using YAML custom resources which you keep in Git, subject to change control and audit, and allows you to have infrastructure as code.
· Ability to deploy new and updated instances through automated deployment pipelines, and even upgrade in place with no disruption
· Simpler reuse of integration assets through templates, with approved policies that help to enforce key standards or good practices.
· Migrations that have become faster, easier and much less stressful thanks to the customised upgrade readiness checklist, ensuring you understand every step you need to take and in what order.
And those benefits are the key reasons that Cloud Pak for Integration made sense. Beyond those there are more recent innovations you are just starting to take advantage of including the Integration Assemblies feature. This allows you to define and group multiple integration steps across multiple products, and then manage and even deploy them all together in a single operation. This should save you so much time and effort.
In addition to all the built-in features of Cloud Pak for Integration, you also appreciate getting all the key IBM integration software offerings in a single consistent package.
You have been using IBM MQ and App Connect to keep your systems of record updated with reliability and security, and were of course glad to take advantage of MQ Native HA and now MQ Cross-Region Replication to use the container-native HA features of MQ Advanced. For years you had been looking for a simpler way to make MQ ‘multi-region’. Now it’s baked into the product itself. What could be easier?
Other parts of your business are also deploying the API Management and Kafka streaming features included in Cloud Pak for Integration, included within the licensing.
Once power is restored to the local area, and the main production systems are brought back online, you discuss the incident with your operations team. One of them came over recently from a competitor business. This person was so impressed by the container-native approach at your business, and the latest seamless DR switch has completely won them over. They assure you that for anyone else in a similar position, this could be the tipping point for other MQ customers looking at moving to containers. They tell you “Running this in Kubernetes with Cloud Pak for Integration means you get replication, plus the agility of automated deployments. It is ‘resilience meets modern operations’, across any region or even multi-cloud”.
You couldn’t agree more. With the relentless focus on smarter container native features in IBM MQ, other advances in the rest of the integration products and innovation to make your life easier in creating, deploying, operating and updating integrations in Cloud Pak for Integration itself, you sigh with relief as another busy, yet successful week comes to a close.
Does this style of deployment appeal to your business. With the availability of MQ Cross Region Replication in Cloud Pak for Integration, maybe the time to take advantage of the multiple benefits of container-native integration is now. Certainly there is nothing now to stop you.
For more information about how IBM MQ Cross Region replication can help your business, read the blog here.
You can use IBM MQ 9.4.2 including the Cross Region Replication feature in Cloud Pak for Integration 16.1.1 – and you can read a blog about that here.
Sign up to an upcoming webinar on Cloud Pak for Integration covering even more new features. Click Here.
