In years gone by surgery was terrifying and bloody. Large incisions, big scars, long recovery and healing periods, risks of infection. Now everything is more precise. Keyhole surgery. Ultrasonic scalpels. Tiny incisions. No wider impacts to the rest of the body. You can be in and out the same day.

Surgery has evolved and learned to use precision. So have other industries like mining. This summer we had a family vacation in California and visited the old Gold-rush towns and mines. This included Malakoff Diggins. This was one of the sites where hydraulic mining was used. High-pressure water was used to wash away whole hillsides to expose and access the seams of gold. Very powerful, and it did work to expose gold, but the damage to the local environment, and down-stream was huge and lasts even now 150 years later.

What about integration? Are you ready to move from the scarred hills of Malakoff Diggins to the precision of keyhole surgery with your integrations? Many businesses have had for many years powerful, effective integration deployments running in VMs. Any changes to the deployed integrations or their environments can have massive negative impacts, so much so that businesses take months to make any changes, if they dare risk them at all. We hear the impact of changes being referred to as the ‘blast-radius’. Businesses are as nervous of the impact as I would be in a gold-mine with a stick of dynamite.

What is the impact of those businesses deploying integration in VMs? Multiple components, such as MQ, App Connect, and DataPower, all deployed together. Or even if a single component is in a VM, there will likely be multiple integrations deployed in the same run-time environment. And can you be sure that making a change won’t interfere with everything else running in the VM? Change an integration, upload a patch, add a Queue. The impact could be as bad as sluicing away a hillside or slicing open your belly to get to a ruptured appendix.

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration is built to provide a container-native integration platform, running on Red Hat OpenShift. It was also recently extended to support Azure Kubernetes Service. Containers isolate each component, each integration. Combined with DevOps and a CI/CD pipeline, new integrations or changes to existing integrations can take place seamlessly, and without impact. Just like someone getting keyhole surgery might walk-in and walk-out the hospital the same day. No need for weeks of bed rest, or for weeks of testing against non-prod systems. No unexpected downtime requiring changes to be backed out.

Even after 150 years the scarred landscape remains around Malakoff Diggins. But customers who have deployed Cloud Pak for Integration tell us they can go from code-complete of a new application, to world-wide production deployment in 5 minutes. We also have customers who can take a new version of Cloud Pak for Integration, or one of the bundled components like IBM MQ and deploy it into their production systems the same day. Even if it is a Friday!

Want to deploy a new gateway policy? With container-native Cloud Pak for Integration you can deploy a new DataPower policy knowing it won’t touch or impact other services. In a VM you might need to plan for a full server refresh. You’re going to be busy for days. Container-native integrations in Cloud Pak not only allow your business to move at the speed of business, but help you save hours, days or even weeks of effort.

Recent updates to Cloud Pak for Integration have continued to provide improved capabilities to make creation, deployment and update of integrations faster and simpler. Integration Assemblies allow you to build and deploy whole end-to-end integrations in a single step, using a graphical canvas, with the product pulling together all required pre-requisites needed for deployment. Everything is pulled into the YAML for the CR which can go into Git. And updating container-native environments is made even easier with the upgrade readiness checklist.

With containers driving 25% of industry workloads already, and growing, Cloud Pak for Integration is your precision integration platform for on-prem or cloud native self-managed integration solutions. While IBM webMethods Hybrid Integration SaaS suits cloud-first iPaaS needs, many integration workloads would benefit from the surgery-like precision provided by Cloud Pak for Integration, with all components being operator deployed and container native.

It's time for your business to limit the blast radius of changes, to switch away from the VMs to the ultrasonic scalpel of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration.

Want to know more?

 Learn more about IBM Cloud Pak for Integration here, including requesting a live demo.

Or watch a webinar covering the latest enhancements to the Cloud Pak here.