In the depths of winter in the UK we are told that Monday 21st January is referred to as Blue Monday, when the fun of New Year has died away and it is clearly a long time to go until the arrival of the lighter warmer days of spring. But now, just a couple of weeks after Blue Monday, Big Blue IBM is trying to relieve the gloom with the announcement of the latest CD release: IBM MQ V9.1.2. You can read the announcement letter here.
As the 2nd Continuous Delivery release of MQ V9.1, this builds on the previous release with a number of enhancements and new capabilities.
Probably the one that will be of most interest to people is a new capability which is the first step in what will be an ongoing series of updates to MQ. We are calling this a Uniform Cluster, and this specific enhancement is designed to make it easier to balance workload across queue managers which could be both growing and shrinking. This workload balancing will be without the need for the applications to co-ordinate changes in the MQ Queue Manager destinations. Instead MQ will itself balance the workload across the set of Queue Managers defined to be a part of this ‘Uniform Cluster’. Initially this is only for applications written in C. This area of MQ is likely to continue to be an area of focus, as further enhancements could easily be considered with a view to MQ being far easier to scale up and scale down, much as a cloud native service would be expected to do.
Another key enhancement is around the use of REST messaging. When this feature was initially introduced, it sparked lots of interest, as there are many use cases where it would be helpful to call MQ without having MQ Client libraries. In this release, connection pools are supported allowing for the caching of connections for reuse, which should improve throughput and reduce resource use.
Other updates in the base MQ capabilities include .NET core support for Linux to add to the Windows support added in MQ V9.1.1. Also improvements to scalability and availability when working with WebSphere Liberty for XA transactions.
Increasingly important to many MQ customers is MQ Advanced. The MQ MFT feature of MQ Advanced, which is widely used to onboard file data into MQ and then send and consume that data as MQ messages gets further REST API functions to enhance administration. This continues what we have seen in the last few releases for MQ MFT.
Other interesting improvements include updates to the Salesforce and Blockchain bridges, and the MQ Appliance sees errors logs integrated with system log external targets.
There are a number of other really interesting updates to the MQ family which have also come out at this time.
Probably everyone is seeing a lot of the same interest in container deployments. And IBM MQ has been supporting container deployments for many years, and recently have put out an IBM Cloud Pak to better support deployment on IBM Cloud Private. However we have now also released a container image of MQ Advanced for Developers for Pivotal Cloud Foundry. This will be available shortly.
The MQ Cloud offering, which provides a hosted MQ environment maintained by IBM has been seeing lots of growth and enhancement, with new data centers being added for both IBM Cloud and AWS, as well as adding functional support for the MQ AMS end to end encryption and the MQ MFT features. The latest update adds a Lite plan, allowing ongoing free use of a hosted MQ environment, without the need for a credit card, limited to 1000 messages per month. Check it out here and now!
And finally, something else for the developers. While MQ continues to be a robust production platform on Linux, Windows and other environments, there hasn’t been any IBM provided releases for Mac. If you wanted to develop MQ applications on Mac you would need a VM with a supported OS. However we have now released the MQ client for Mac – you can download today from here and start developing much more simply today.
UPDATE: Now we have availability of MQ V9.1.2 here is a blog from Ian Harwood expanding some of the points and with links to access MQ etc.
And if all that doesn’t blow away the winter blues, what will? Maybe a trip to San Francisco for the Think 2019 Conference? I have a number of presentations there so come by and say hello. Otherwise there will be a number of other events through the year. Let’s hope for some sunny and warm weather!
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