IBM Modern Integration Field Guide

What are IBM Cloud Paks?

Beyond containers and Kubernetes, you need to orchestrate your production topology and provide management, security and governance for your applications. IBM Cloud Paks are enterprise-ready, containerized software solutions that run on Red Hat® OpenShift® on IBM Cloud™ and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Built on a common integration layer, IBM Cloud Paks include containerized IBM middleware and common software services for development and management.

• IBM Cloud Pak™ for Applications. Quickly build cloud-native apps by leveraging built-in developer tools and processes, including support for microservices functions and serverless computing. 
• IBM Cloud Pak™ for Data. Simplify the collection, organization, and analysis of data. Turn data into insights through an integrated catalog of IBM, open source, and third-party microservices add-ons. 
• IBM Cloud Pak™ for Integration. Achieve the speed, flexibility, security, and scale required for all of your integration and digital transformation initiatives, including API lifecycle, application and data integration, messaging and events, high-speed transfer, and integration security
• IBM Cloud Pak™ for Automation. Deploy on your choice of clouds, with low-code tools for business users and real-time performance visibility for business managers. Migrate your automation runtimes without application changes or data migration. Automate at scale without vendor lock-in.
• IBM Cloud Pak™ for Multicloud Management. Gain consistent visibility, automation, and governance across a wide range of hybrid, multicloud management capabilities including integration with existing tools and processes
• IBM Cloud Pak™ for Security. Integrate security tools to gain insights into threats across hybrid, multicloud environments.

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration 

Building integrated solutions requires you to use more than one integration pattern at a time. Simplify the management of your integration architecture and reduce cost. Running on Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud Pak for Integration gives you the agility to deploy workloads on-premises and on private and public clouds. 

• API lifecycle management. Create, secure, manage, share, and monetize APIs across clouds while you maintain continuous availability. 
• Application and data integration. Integrate your business data and applications quickly and easily across any cloud system
• Enterprise messaging. Simplify, accelerate, and facilitate the reliable exchange of data with a trusted, flexible, and security-rich messaging solution. 
• Event streaming. Use Apache Kafka to deliver messages more easily and reliably and to react to events in real time. 
• High-speed data transfer. Reliably send, share, stream, and sync large files and data sets at maximum speed. 
• Platform-level security, automation, and monitoring. Quickly set up and manage gateways, control access on a per resource basis, deploy your integration flows, and monitor all of your traffic.

API lifecycle management 

Bridge the gap between cloud and on-premises applications quickly and easily by abstracting your back-end implementation as APIs. One of the best ways to do this is by exposing services as APIs for external consumption and let the consuming applications compose the integration logic

• Expand. Provide a standard API interface. Include global API discovery to access key business functions as fine-grained services. Encourage data reuse and mashups driven by innovative transformation use cases.
• Integrate. Create a significant impact on your business goals by exposing core services through managed APIs. Enable projects to integrate with one another and discover the benefits of synergy across the enterprise.
• Scale. Be prepared to scale dynamically based on the demands of your expanding ecosystem and other usage metrics.

Application & data integration

Integrate all your business data and applications across any cloud more quickly and easily using open standards. From the simplest SaaS application to the most complex legacy systems, this pattern alleviates the concern about mismatched sources, formats, or standards. 

• Integrate applications. Connect applications and data sources on-premises or across multiple clouds to coordinate the exchange of business information as a coarse-grained service so that core data and transactions maintain their integrity. In contrast to the API management pattern, this pattern is best suited for coarse-grained services. 
• Integrate data. In near real time, synchronize data across multiple endpoints in the integration landscape to achieve a cohesive view of data, gathered from legacy back ends to SaaS applications, to DBaaS repositories, to analytics cloud services.
• Incorporate agile integration. Unify cross-enterprise capabilities. Enforce the use of core enterprise services and business processes. Include cognitive augmentation within your integration logic. Set up agile organizational models and governance practices.

Enterprise messaging

Simplify, accelerate, and facilitate the reliable exchange of data with a flexible and enhance security-rich IT services messaging solution. Extend traditional messaging capabilities in modern applications to communicate with new technologies from AI, IoT devices, and other digital channels. 

• Ensure secure and reliable messaging. Preserve message integrity throughout the network, protect data, and ensure regulatory compliance with security-rich functions. Provide reliable delivery without message loss, duplication, or complex recovery.
• Unify your enterprise. More easily integrate heterogeneous application platforms using industry-standard JMS messaging protocols, scalable publish-subscribe, and a choice of APIs
• Expect high performance and scalable message transfer. Your apps can rely on a highly available solution with fully automated failover, dynamically distributed messaging workloads, high throughput, and a low-latency solution.
• Simplify management and control. Use a dashboard to gain insights with visibility to message and file tracking. Audit data movement and transaction completion.

Event streaming

Take advantage of event streams to build adaptive solutions with engaging, more personalized user experiences by responding to events before the moment passes. By design, events occur in a continuous stream from a multitude of sources in a low-latency, high-velocity manner. 

• Decrease system complexity. Loose coupling allows event producers to emit events without any knowledge about who is going to consume those events. Likewise, event consumers don’t need to be aware of the event emitters. 
• Simplify the interface. One event producer can reach multiple endpoints with a single call.
• React to events as they happen. Enable the following scenarios: IoT device, streaming analytics, real-time back-end transactions, geolocation tracking, and auditing
• Facilitate machine learning. Improve predictive analytics by moving to real-time event streaming from batch processing

High-speed file transfer

Enterprises need a reliable, fast, secure data transfer and synchronized system that is hybrid and multi-cloud IT services. An integration platform makes it possible to securely transfer data across geographies faster than traditional tools, between any kind of storage, whether it’s on-premises, in the cloud, or across diverse cloud vendors.

• Integrate application data. Coordinate the exchange of business information so that data is available when and where it is needed.
• Transform data for analytics. Access, cleanse, and prepare data to create a consistent view of your business within a data warehouse or data lake.
• Enrich enterprise data. Augment DBaaS content with data from enterprise back-end systems for a 360-degree view of the user. Allow partner and in-house data sources to sync and complement each other’s updates
• Transfer data. Move huge amounts of data between on-premises and cloud or from cloud to cloud rapidly and predictably with enhanced levels of IT service security. Speed the adoption of cloud platforms when data is very large and needs to be exchanged across long distances. 

IBM Garage: Accelerate your journey

Modernization comes in many flavors, and rewriting your entire estate is not feasible. Big bang modernization efforts are risky, so it is best to break large initiatives into smaller projects with measurable impact. Your goal is to accelerate value, deliver frequently, and reduce risk. IBM Garage experts can help.

• Co-create. Identify a business modernization opportunity. Define and build the MVP with your squad, get feedback, and co-create a solution.
• Co-execute. Manage risk by choosing the right approach to modernize your current estate. Accelerate your journey through automation and technology
• Co-operate. Harden for production, standardize operations, and improve DevOps efficiency across your application estate. 

---