Your integrations, wherever they run are the heartbeat of your business. Every message, every API call, every transformation is essential in delivering business value, customer satisfaction and effective use of data. And your business is unlikely to be restricted to a single location, whether physical or virtual.
So don’t you want to have a single view of your integrations in a single window? Whether they are running in one OpenShift cluster, or many different ones. Spanning clusters in one location, or in multiple locations. Or even see your deployed integrations in your development, test and production clusters, all together?
The good news is that with the announcement of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration 16.1.2 with the new Unified Management feature, you now get more visibility and control of your integrations, and your business.
The aim of Unified Management in Cloud Pak for Integration is to ensure that from within your single Platform UI window, you can see all the integrations you have deployed in any of your OpenShift clusters. No more having to jump between different windows or tabs. No more missing that one of your integrations, whether App Connect flows, or MQ Queue Managers or whatever, has failed. You can see all of them, and their status from a single window.
This is now possible by adding a LocationAgent into each cluster and defining a new Instance Location field in your Platform UI. This allows your Platform UI to show you each of the integrations in those additional locations. And even better, you can now select any of the integrations running anywhere and click through to allow you to make changes to those integration in their specific cluster.
Let’s think of an immediate reason why this will be a very useful feature. You might have read my previous blog on the MQ Cross Region Replication feature which provides built-in DR replication to environments in another region. Now imagine you have both your local MQ Native HA deployments visible in your single Platform UI window, but also your remote DR MQ deployments visible as well, flagged with their Instance Location. How reassuring to see that everything is up and ready to look after your business resilience.
The new Cloud Pak for Integration 16.1.2 release also includes some additional new features which will further enhance the product. Probably the key new feature in this release, in addition to the already mentioned Unified Management, is that Platform UI is now supported for deployments into Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Previous releases of Cloud Pak for Integration have only supported deployments of the Cloud Pak components into Red Hat OpenShift environments.
However, many customers have been deploying the separate integration capabilities of Cloud Pak for Integration (i.e. IBM MQ, IBM App Connect etc.) as containers in AKS. And with this release, those customers can also now deploy the Cloud Pak for Integration Platform UI into AKS to view and manage those deployed integrations. At this time, only the Platform UI is supported for deployment into AKS, but those customers deploying on AKS will have a more seamless and better integrated experience. While deploying on AKS is now supported as an option, Red Hat OpenShift remains the recommended deployment Kubernetes platform.
The final enhancement in Cloud Pak for Integration 16.1.2 is another enhancement to the integration assemblies and graphical canvas feature. These features are used to improve the devops experience when deploying one or more integrations as Kubernetes objects, and allow infrastructure as code to become the standard approach for integration deployment, with all the savings expected from automation, governance and repeatability. The new update allows for customers to add assets onto the canvas directly from the Automation Assets repository. This will allow faster, more seamless creation and then deployment of integrations. And with Approved Assets subject to enforcement, this means this has governance built-in at every step.
This new release, with Unified Management and new support for AKS represents the tipping point and a breakout of Cloud Pak for Integration delivering integrations that matter to the business, but are able to be seamlessly deployed, managed and updated from a single UI window, across any number of environments. Build and run your business, with your integrations doing what you need, where you need them. Is this release of Cloud Pak for Integration the first step in the next phase of your business’s success?
Look out for the general availability on June 20th 2025, and in the meantime join me for a webinar to discuss this release. Sign up here: https://ibm.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1716995&tp_key=9b9096017f