Integration at the Crossroads

Let’s imagine the integration control centre of pretty much any business today. Thousands of them will be running integration products like IBM MQ to keep their business-critical data flowing, or IBM App Connect to access and transform data. They might have IBM DataPower appliances as secure gateways or IBM API Connect to fuel their APIs for wider information access. And for many of these businesses all these products will be deployed in Virtual Machines (VMs). This style of deployment will have been in place for many years and runs smoothly. Therefore, why risk any change?

The world is moving faster, putting increasing pressures on businesses in turn. Customers demand real-time insights. DevOps teams live and breathe agility and automation. The CEO or CIO expects hybrid cloud today, not tomorrow. Do these pressures resonate with your business? Certainly, when I visit customers and talk about their plans, these are familiar drivers: stick with the VMs they are using today or leap to a modern containerized future taking advantage of Cloud Pak for Integration deploying on Red Hat OpenShift and allowing them to exploit the potential of this new architecture. Modernizing your integration isn’t just a tech upgrade but a business accelerator. Let’s review how CP4I can be your bridge to agile integration, without losing the IBM integration products you already trust your business with.

Today – your VM comfort zone – and its limits

Your VM-based deployments of MQ, App Connect, API Connect (as OVA) and DataPower appliances or VM-based virtual gateways are up, running and rock-solid. They power your business through whatever happens. But VM deployments carry a lot of baggage. Updates are siloed, and tightly interconnected. Scaling is manual, and not very fine-grained. And development and deployment cycles can be long. So customers tell me that although their infrastructure runs fine, they simply can’t roll-out new integrations or new APIs fast enough. No one wants to be slower to market than the competition.

For years Kim Clark has been talking about the need for Agile Integration, pointing out that traditional deployments of integration create bottlenecks, and skilled teams spend their time doing maintenance rather than innovating or focusing on productivity. The truth is that VMs lack the elasticity of containers, which makes it hard to meet today’s demand for rapid, scalable integrations.

At the same time your business faces growing pressure to connect with new apps, both on-premises and in the cloud, to secure hybrid workloads and to share access to data faster, in real-time. At the same time there will be pressures on budgets, both for people and hardware. If you stick with VM based deployments, you risk falling behind in a world where agility is essential.

Why deploy using Cloud Pak for Integration on OpenShift?

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration (CP4I) is your ticket to modernizing without disruption. It wraps your key integration components (MQ, App Connect, DataPower, API Connect, Event Streams) into a container-based, Kubernetes-powered platform, delivering flexibility and speed to your business. Cloud Pak for Integration provides a unified experience to deploy and manage all types of integration across clouds and on-premises environments, with enterprise-grade security. The latest release (CP4I 16.1.2) adds Unified Management, allowing a single view and management of integrations deployed over multiple clusters. And 16.1.2 also increased deployment flexibility by adding Azure Kubernetes Service as an alternative to Red Hat OpenShift for the Platform UI deployment environment

Thinking back to Kim Clark’s agile integration vision – he focuses on 3 pillars: decentralized ownership, API-led connectivity, and event-driven architectures. Cloud Pak for Integration delivers these by enabling DevOps teams to deploy integrations via CI/CD pipelines, scale with Operators for easier container configuration, and use smart connectors to speed up application connectivity.  

When we talk with our customers who have already done this, whether retailers, logistics companies or car manufacturers they find they have cut their deployment time of new integrations or MQ instances down from days to hours thanks to the automation they can now take advantage of.

Compare also infrastructure savings possible with the cloud-native architecture rather than the sprawl of VMs that are deployed and run in-place for years with no ability to scale workloads down or reuse spare capacity.

And all of this can be achieved at your own pace, migrating gradually, running VM and container deployments side-by-side under the same Cloud Pak for Integration license, preserving your businesses existing deployment while putting CP4I through its paces.

“Crossing the chasm” – overcoming the modernization hurdle

Hesitation about change is understandable. “Our VMs work fine, so why risk change?” The opportunity here is not in abandoning what works, but rather amplifying it. Existing MQ applications don’t care if the MQ Queue Manager is running in a VM or in a container. An App Connect integration flow runs in a VM or in a container. Deployment of containers using Operators ensures standardization of approach and provides greatly increased potential for automation.

There might be some concerns about skills, given this is a very different environment for deployment, operation and management than the more familiar VM architecture. But Cloud Pak for Integration has delivered multiple enhancements designed to ensure that the initial day 1 experience as well as the ongoing day 2 experience is intuitive and powerful, with a UI to guide you, an AI-powered integration assistant to help, a graphical canvas to simplify building end-to-end integrations and even an upgrade checklist with a personalized step-by-step guide to migrating deployments. The overall experience ensures that many of the time-consuming aspects of running in VMs simply aren’t a problem with container deployments.

And with the option in clouds to select managed OpenShift environments, or with CP4I 16.1.2 the added choice of AKS, your infrastructure team don’t even need to be concerned about how to manage the Kubernetes environment either.

The outcome: faster updates, lower costs, and happier DevOps teams. Together these will ensure the customers, and the business itself will experience faster, and better change.

Your next step to business agility

Modernizing with CP4I on OpenShift isn’t simply a technical update, it is a whole new mindset. You can turn your integration backbone into a springboard for innovation. As I previously wrote here integration can be like trying to cross a river. You need strong stepping stones to move across successfully. CP4I is that stepping stone. You have MQ’s reliability, App Connect’s flexibility, DataPower’s security. Alongside those you have API Connect and Event Streams with their ability to provide access to information, and Aspera moving data at high speed. All integration needs are covered.

What are you waiting for? You can request a live demo or listen to our recent webinar about Cloud Pak for Integration. Don’t let inertia hold you back. Get in touch to discuss your options today.