From the mainframe to the mobile or to infinity and beyond. IBM MQ is everywhere!

Probably more than a decade ago, when I had a role in IBM marketing I was looking for a phrase to describe the way in which IBM MQ, and more widely the whole span of IBM integration solutions could be used across the business infrastructure, and I came up with the phrase “from the mainframe to the mobile”. IBM MQ has been at the heart of the enterprise, running on mainframes right from the early days. And MQTT support has been around for many years as well, placing MQ endpoints in sensors and mobile phones providing a great breadth of coverage for businesses wanting to ensure they can reliably and securely exchange data across both servers and physical devices.

But recently as part of a refreshed move to listen to and work with developers, the IBM MQ team in Hursley have gone a step further. With the examples above, we would typically expect the MQ Queue Managers to be running on the mainframe, or on physical appliances, or maybe on Linux servers in a datacenter or in the cloud. And the applications would be running on their own servers with MQ Clients or MQTT clients at the endpoints connecting to the MQ Queue Managers over the network. But as part of this new initiative, we are demonstrating MQ Queue Managers running on the smallest servers yet – Raspberry Pi Zeros.

Our developer initiative is showing that MQ can be simple to develop for, and simple to deploy, and we can use both of these aspects to demonstrate the value of IBM MQ to anyone who might not be familiar with messaging as a programming technique. One example is programming MQ using Scratch. Also being able to show MQ running in a portable non-threatening environment is a great way to demonstrate the usefulness, especially if all the same MQ capabilities are in action. Our demonstration includes installing separate MQ Queue Managers on 2 separate Raspberry Pi Zero boards. And not just running, but running as a High Availability configuration, so that messages were preserved and the 2nd Queue Manager would take over when the 1st one fails.

The demonstration may be simple, but it is very effective, but what I find most compelling is the example of the MQ Queue Managers running on such a small piece of kit. IBM MQ is one of the most important software offerings in the world. Most of the world’s infrastructure depends on it. Banking, insurance, travel and transportation, retail. You name it, most of the leading businesses in the world rely on MQ running and processing trillions of messages per day. But the perception would be that MQ runs in the datacenter, or maybe these days in both the datacenter and the cloud.

What I would like us to think about is the idea of MQ running embedded in such small devices like the Pi Zero. If you can run a fully featured MQ Queue Manager there, then where else could you run it. What difference might it make in today’s infrastructure or tomorrow’s infrastructure if IBM MQ was running in the smallest computing devices? Are there any use cases?

It’s important to point out that MQ running on the Pi Zero is not an officially supported implementation, and IBM has no plans to support it in the future. But sometimes it is great for us to think outside the box. So let’s have your ideas as to whether MQ would benefit from running in these smaller configurations. Either share here or reach out to me directly and I will try to comment with another blog entry later.

As well as the demonstrations mentioned above, IBM has been working a lot on improving IBM for developers. There was a recent release of the MQ Client for Mac OS. We added REST Messaging as an option for MQ. There is a tutorial called Learn MQ, and a badge for MQ developer essentials. And we have had MQ Advanced for Developers available for free download since 2013.

In Toy Story Buzz Lightyear could fall with style but set his sights on the stars. Let’s move from the “mainframe to the mobile” to “infinity and beyond” with IBM MQ.

(Buzz Lightyear is obviously Disney IP – image just used here for effect, and does not signify any ownership or endorsement.)

Tags: Buzz Lightyear, developers, High Availability, Hursley, IBM MQ, Learn MQ, LearnMQ, Mac OS, Mainframe, Mainframe to the mobile, MQ Advanced, MQ Advanced for Developers, MQ Client for Mac, MQ Developer Essentials, MQ REST messaging, Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi, Scratch, Toy Story, Toy Story 4