Just prior to big IBM conferences like IBM Think there are usually a number of new product announcements. These are scheduled to allow the conference attendees to get not just the great access to leadership keynotes, but the latest updates covering technical content that has only just been announced.

This is why, just a few weeks after the previous announcement of Cloud Pak for Integration 2020.1.1, IBM announced on April 28^th 2020, another new release Cloud Pak for Integration 2020.2.1. It is important to note this is the announcement letter, and not the GA. If you read the announcement letter you will see that the GA date is June 26^th 2020. Normally we would look to announce closer to the availability date, but the timing for IBM Think led us to bring forward the announcement.

As you might know IBM Think is now a virtual only event, with far fewer sessions, which are mostly keynotes, and supplemented by online demos. But imagine the event had taken place with all the sessions, and you were in San Francisco at the Moscone Center, what would the Cloud Pak for Integration “What’s new” session covered?

Well the big news in this release is the move to support Operators. And if that’s the case, we had better explain what these are, and why they are important.

Operators ease the operational complexity of running software in Kubernetes. This is critical because Kubernetes provides tremendous capabilities, but as this is new to many customers it can take time to harness the power. Operators work across multiple steps in the software lifecycle, through installation, operation and maintenance.

They provide ways to exploit the power that Kubernetes offers, such as repeatability of installation and upgrades of software offerings and helps to ensure that the software is deployed consistently. And once the Operator is defined, then Kubernetes is able to follow the Operator to deliver the outcome specified, again and again.

Many of the discussions about the benefits of container deployments might reference the goal for a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. Having operators in place to help can assist businesses in unlocking these benefits.

Cloud Pak for Integration makes use of the Red Hat Operator Lifecycle Manager to help users install, update and manage the lifecycle of all of their Operators as well as providing a consistent method for deployment. This should provide a much better experience in deploying only selected features and components of the Cloud Pak for Integration.

As part of this release IBM Event Streams, which is part of the IBM Cloud Pak for Integration takes advantage of the open source Strimzi Operator that is published by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

There is more information about the upcoming release in the announcement letter linked above. Alongside this announcement of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, some of the bundled products have seen updates and announcement as well. 

IBM MQ 
IBM API Connect and IBM DataPower