Each day, no matter the job, there is a challenge to do better. Can you be more efficient? Can you be faster? Can you do more, with less? These challenges apply everywhere, but for years we have been talking with customers about their integration needs and this is exactly what we have heard from them.
Trying to enhance your enterprise integrations can seem to be a near impossible task. You have skilled people, but probably never enough, and they are always busy keeping the existing implementations running to power your business so that they never can take the time needed to deploy new implementations fast enough to meet the needs of the business, to try something new or to overhaul the existing integrations.
Over the last few years IBM has invested heavily in this area to overcome these issues and to deliver increased value to customers, enabling them to create, deploy and update integrations with less effort. Their businesses can move faster and they can even reduce their costs. IBM has an integration solution that can address any customer need, and as part of Cloud Pak for Integration they have been re-engineered to be cloud-native, deployable in containers. Customers can now deploy the integration components they need anywhere that runs Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. Every product can be deployed using Operators as part of a CI/CD DevOps strategy making it faster and easier to not only get integrations into production, but to keep them running and to update them.
The latest release, Cloud Pak for Integration 2023.2.1, announced here takes this even further, adding additional enhancements and new capabilities to what has already been delivered in past release.
One of the most notable new features builds on the prior ‘automated deployment’ feature. This feature allows integration solutions to be defined and managed as a single deployable object. Not only does this make it easier to define an entire integration solution, with suggested default values being supplied for many of the options, but it is then easier to move forward through development, test and production cycles with all components managed together. The initial release provided this feature for MQ and Event Streams deployments. In the latest release this now adds API Connect and App Connect deployments. Additionally, when creating these new deployable integration solutions, adding High Availability is as simple as selecting an option which will then ensure the integration solution is deployed as a highly available configuration.
Another enhancement in the latest release provides additional value when using IBM Instana with Cloud Pak for Integration deployments. In previous releases customers could use IBM Instana to provide monitoring across integration components, as well as providing tracing for MQ and App Connect deployments. In the latest release IBM Instana can now offer tracing for Event Streams and API Connect deployments. And any new purchases of Cloud Pak for Integration still benefit from 6 months free entitlement to IBM Instana for use with entitled Integration products.
Other enhancements in the most recent release include updated deployment options for Event Endpoint Management which can now be deployed independently of API Connect deployments in OpenShift environments. This will make it simpler for customers to make use of Kafka events by exposing them as APIs using the AsyncAPI standard.
Also the IBM Integration product teams have been working with IBM Turbonomic team to enhance the Resource Management suggestions that IBM Turbonomic will offer to ensure that they are tailored to match the environment and the specific integration product requirements.
The announcement letter also covers a number of other exciting new products and updates to existing products. New offerings include IBM Event Automation an Noname Advanced API Security for IBM. There is also a new API Connect as a Service Advanced tier option, and the latest IBM MQ 9.3.3 release.
With improvements such as the update to the automated deployment feature, the latest Cloud Pak for Integration will enable your integration team to move faster, and deploy richer, more complete integration solutions with High Availability, without adding complexity or overloading your skilled team members.
You can request trial entitlement of Cloud Pak for Integration here but the latest release won’t be available until June 16th 2023.
Tags: API Connect, App Connect, Automated Deployments, CP4I, CP4I 2023.2.1, Event Endpoint Management, Event Streams, IBM Cloud Pak for Integration, IBM Event Automation, IBM Instana, IBM MQ 9.3.3, IBM Turbonomic, Kafka, Red Hat OpenShift
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