Hi,

I am reviewing and presenting App Connect Designer internally in my company.

In terms of CI/CD, the file format for editable flows is .yaml, the file format for deployable flows is .bar.

I was wondering the following in terms of automation possiblities:

For AWS cloud version:

• Is there any CLI or something along those lines to automate processes
• Can I export yaml and bar files from a cli?
• Can I convert yaml files to bar files from a cli?
• Can I deploy bar files to integration runtimes from a cli?

For the on-prem version (on openshift in our case), I know there is openshift CLI, but I don't know the access it has to designer.

For on-prem I have the same questions except for I also want to know if it's from the openshift cli, or if there is a designer cli, or if it is not possible.

I also know, that on openshift connector accounts are kept in an openshift configuration, which I believe can be provided to runtimes trough cli, so on-prem I know I can share account information through CLI. Does anyone know if the same is possible for the AWS cloud? (ofcourse assuming there is some cli)

In general, any information on how to automate designer with ci/cd about deployments and about account configuration would be helpful, especially for the AWS cloud version.

Thankyou for responding

Hello,

With regards to support for CI/CD pipelines for the IBM App Connect Enterprise as a Service offering on AWS we have a public API - you can find details at the following link within the documentation and also some related blog posts from my colleagues:

• https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/app-connect/saas?topic=information-api-overview
• https://community.ibm.com/community/user/integration/blogs/adam-roberts/2023/07/27/introducing-the-app-connect-public-api
• https://community.ibm.com/community/user/integration/blogs/sher-chowdhury/2023/09/15/using-app-connect-public-api-with-aws-codedeploy

There is no "CLI" that we provide but you can use "curl" or your application of choice to programmatically manage your integrations and associated resources. 

The API specification is available at the following link and details all the things that are currently supported:

• https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/app-connect/saas?topic=overview-openapi-document

Currently you can not export flows you have created in Designer as YAML or BAR files - that is a manual task currently. I would be interested to confirm on the use case and priority of being able to do this - it was not something that we included on launch but definitely something that we would consider if there was a requirement for it.

At the moment there is no external tool available for converting YAML files to BAR files programmatically but this is something that I was discussing just this week with two of my colleagues and we do understand the requirement here and are looking at the best options for making this available in the future.

With regards to being able to deploy BAR files to IntegrationRuntimes you can certainly do this - hopefully the information in the prior links should give you the information you need to understand how to achieve this. Similar for the accounts - this is covered under the /api/v1/configurations API.

Please let me know if you have any more questions and some more information on the need to programatically export flow YAML and BAR files.

Hi Martin

this API does not cater for the Catalog, or does it?

Hi Matthias

The Catalog is under the covers backed by an Account Configuration like those you can manage with the public API, however, this particular "backing" Account is not accessible via the API. That said I would be interested in the requirement to be able to do this as the Catalog is just associated to the Designer Authoring capability within the managed service and is just for development activities and not for production workloads. For production workloads or UAT / SIT environments that would be looking to emulate production you would create an IntegrationRuntime for the flow and create and use Account Configurations and not create those accounts via the Catalog.

Would be interested if you could share your use-case for interacting with the Catalog using the public API so I can better understand this requirement.