For over ten years, IBM MQ in containers has been evolving. Starting with 9.4.1 (released October 2024), IBM introduced pre-built container images which are supported on most Kubernetes container environments — as long as they were built on containerd or cri-o, which is nearly all of them. However, you still needed to manage your own deployment code, because the MQ Operator was exclusively available on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Now, IBM is taking a key step forward by extending the MQ Operator to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)—enabling customers to run MQ seamlessly across broader container platforms. The journey begins with an exclusive preview. 

What's in the Preview? 

IBM has published a Helm chart that allows users to install the MQ Operator on Amazon EKS and deploy queue managers.  Amazon EKS does not include OpenShift’s Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM), so the Helm chart is necessary to deploy the operator. For the preview, air-gap installation is not supported, so the MQ Operator will pull the appropriate queue manager images from the IBM Cloud container registry.

While this preview release is not yet fully supported, IBM is working toward an official production rollout by the end of 2025.You can get started now, by installing the Helm chart from GitHub and following the instructions there. Please raise any issues or start a discussion to let us know what you think. 

Find out more about IBM MQ in Containers. Contact us today! 

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