Integration is essential to every business. As businesses consider the core of their IT infrastructure, their focus might be on their data and applications. But without integration, the data would be locked into siloes; and the applications would be isolated and overloaded with complexity as fragile, tightly coupled connections were added to allow applications to work together and share information. This impacts business agility—slowing both actions—and the ability to change. 

Businesses are trying to reduce these data exchange barriers through digital transformation to boost innovation and speed to market. But the risk of transformation efforts includes compounding IT complexity and creating even more business data that may have access restrictions.  

Effective integration is essential for driving a successful digital journey. Integration helps connect, automate and digitally transform businesses. It enables businesses to securely connect and share data between their applications and services across hybrid cloud environments. With effective integration, businesses can boost efficiency, productivity, innovation and knowledge sharing.  Their applications and data become more accessible; their environments more resilient and agile; and new integrations are faster and simpler to create and deploy. 

With IBM Cloud Pak® for Integration, organizations are able to unleash their business potential, deliver new experiences, improve customer outcomes and enable automations that can scale across the enterprise.  

Cloud Pak for Integration is a hybrid integration platform that brings together a comprehensive set of integration components that are designed and optimized to work together, deployed on Red Hat® OpenShift®.  

Cloud Pak for Integration enables your business to meet and expedite any integration need. Your business might want to access and share information quickly and simply using APIs. Perhaps you need to discover what’s happening in your business and respond quickly to events. And the business certainly needs to securely and reliably access and update record systems at scale using robust messaging and connectivity.  

In the rest of this paper, we will explore how Cloud Pak for Integration, deployed on Red Hat OpenShift is the best way to provide integrations deploying in AWS. 

What is ROSA? 

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) is a fully managed application platform that allows you to focus on deploying applications and accelerate innovation by offloading the cluster lifecycle management to Red Hat and AWS. ROSA is jointly engineered and supported by AWS and Red Hat. It is native to the AWS console, which reduces complexity and expands the available toolsets with native applications and integrations with AWS services. 

ROSA also enables customers to focus their resources on delivering business value rather than spending valuable time on the undifferentiated management of the underlying platform. 

 Why ROSA for Cloud Pak for Integration in AWS? 

Cloud Pak for Integration runs on Red Hat OpenShift. Therefore, a Red Hat OpenShift cluster must be configured and running to install and configure Cloud Pak for Integration. 

Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) provides a managed Red Hat OpenShift Cluster and is a supported configuration for Cloud Pak for Integration. This means that customers need not create, manage and maintain their own Red Hat OpenShift clusters for Cloud Pak for Integration—they can offload that care and feeding to AWS and Red Hat by using AWS ROSA and spend their time on their business.  

Why Cloud Pak for Integration on ROSA? 

Cloud Pak for Integration is a unified integration solution that is optimized for deployment on Red Hat OpenShift. All the components can be deployed as containers using OpenShift operators to take advantage of Kubernetes container orchestration.  

Integration products were traditionally deployed as middleware infrastructure. They were complex to build and difficult to deploy and to keep running. Once deployed, the focus was to keep the integrations running unchanged, because each business function that use the integration would be tightly coupled to it and dependent on an unchanging, unmoving deployment.  

This rigidity led to integrations and the middleware team that support them were seen as the bottlenecks to business innovation. New business opportunities would spawn new or changed applications and the need to access new data in different ways from different systems. But making changes to already running integration deployments was complex and require skills, testing and time. And even then, making changes would risk effects on other parts of the business.  Innovations would be impacted and even upgrades to patch problems or security issues would be delayed or postponed because of the risk of change. 

Businesses need integration to drive innovation, while still being secure, scalable, robust and reliable; but also being agile, automated, simple and seamless. This was the goal for Cloud Pak for Integration: to provide a single integration solution that brings together all integration capabilities that are deployable anywhere within hours, delivering faster innovation with flexibility and efficiency.  

Cloud Pak for Integration is also meant to be cloud native. Designed to be deployed in containers on Red Hat OpenShift, whatever you choose to deploy consistently uses Kubernetes Operators that set a standard, powerful deployment approach with workloads that can deploy, run, scale, update and restart independently of each other. This approach removes complexity, while providing maximum flexibility.  

 
Flexibility also applies to the licensing. Purchase Cloud Pak for Integration through a single part and deploy any capability with any capacity into any deployment form-factor. Choose container deployments in OpenShift and run alongside individual integration product deployments in VMs—all entitled through a ratio table to consume your Cloud Pak for Integration entitlement, which gives you one price to pay for all your integration needs.  

With all possible integration capabilities that are consistently deployable—either in containers or in VMs—it is now simpler than ever to build, deploy, operate and update integrations to meet every business need for a complete end-to-end solution. As more integration instances are needed, or an integration needs to be updated, DevOps can then be used to seamlessly safeguard automated operations. . Workloads can be scaled up to their defined limits of each container and additional container instances can be deployed to meet needs. All defined through configuration of each solution to meet each separate workload need.

Cloud Pak for Integration takes this approach further through automated integration deployment using integration assemblies. An integration assembly provides a single place to define, manage and deploy all the information associated with the integration solution needed. A customer can start with simply the name of the integration and will be guided using opinionated defaults through the creation of MQ, Event Streams, App Connect and API Connect® components. After this step, the customer is then able to deploy and manage all aspects as a single unified object. This definition can be done through a graphical canvas, a webform or directly in YAML. 

Once integrations are deployed—when updates or migration to future releases is required— this process is also simplified by using a dedicated migration planning tool to guide each individual deployment through a customized process. Through this process and the container deployments that offer decoupled independent workloads, updates and migration can now be seamless and disruption-free. And your business can focus on the future rather than the past.  

Summary 

With integration being essential to business transformation and agility, Cloud Pak for Integration running on ROSA on AWS offers a highly scalable, secure and resilient deployment environment that is managed for you—with a comprehensive integration solution that allows any of your applications in any environment to connect and exchange data. Automation, AI and the cloud work together to power your business transformation, while making sure your data remains easily accessible and secure and that your business can respond to events without becoming overwhelmed.  

Deploy Cloud Pak for Integration into an AWS ROSA environment from the AWS Marketplace.

Purchase new Cloud Pak for Integration licenses on the AWS Marketplace potentially using AWS committed spend.   

Find more information about Cloud Pak for Integration on Red Hat Marketplace.

Download a 1-page flyer about Cloud Pak for Integration on AWS Marketplace.

Interested to hear more? Take the next step by understanding more about agile integration with IBM Cloud Pak for Integration running on (ROSA) Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS. Contact your Red Hat or IBM Account Executive.