We have just released v1.0 of the IBM App Connect Operator. This is a major step forward from our previous offering which was based on helm technology. We now have a single operator that is able to create resources for both App Connect Enterprise customers (trial and production) as well as Cloud Pak for Integration. For customers wanting to try out our operator, all the images are available without any IBM subscription or paid for licence, giving you the opportunity to try it out with minimum effort. When installing the operator, it will install all the required dependencies – IBM Common Services (for logging, metrics and IAM) and also CouchDB (used by our Designer authoring experience).
Moving to an operator-based offering provides a consistent, easy to use interface for installing, creating and editing resources. It enables customers to use their standard kubenetes tools to interface with the components, via the Kube API, with all the App Connect resources acting just like the built-in, native Kubernetes objects.
Features of the App Connect Operator
- 4 new resource types
- Dashboard – Used to create instances of the ACE dashboard
- IntegrationServer – Used to create instances of ACE servers
- DesignerAuthoring – Used to create instances of our award-winning Designer flow authoring experience
- SwitchServer – Used to create a switch server to enable Callable Flows within a cluster
- Introduces new “Configurations” resources. These can be used to provide your integration servers with per-environment configuration such as certificates, usernames/password, and ACE configuration files (server.conf.yaml). This replaces our previous mechanism of “generateSecrets.sh”
- Supports the default “restricted” SCC, meaning no custom SCC configuration is required.
- Includes App Connect Enterprise 11.0.0.9
- Default ACE server image now includes the MQ client by default
- Developer versions of the ACE Dashboard, Integration Server and Switch server available using images hosted on dockerhub
- Production versions of ACE Dashboard, Integration Server, Switch server and Designer authoring available using images hosted on IBM Cloud Entitled Registry. Get your entitlement key from https://myibm.ibm.com/products-services/containerlibrary
- Supports installation on air-gapped systems
- No longer uses Helm for installation
Supported environments:
- The App Connect operator v1.0 supports Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.4
For customers who want to use our Server images only, they are also available directly via Entitled Registry – Obtaining the IBM App Connect Enterprise server image from the IBM Cloud Container Registry
Below is a video showing the experience of installing the operator, creating a dashboard (which also installs the common services components) and creating a server. This is shown on a completely clean cluster, start this process by following Enabling the IBM Operator Catalog and IBM Common Services Operator