Introducing IBM MQ as a Service Reserved Instance on IBM Cloud

IBM is proud to announce IBM MQ as a Service Reserved Instance, a new enterprise messaging SaaS solution on IBM Cloud, built to drive innovation and faster time to value. The service inherits IBM MQ’s market-leading assured (exactly-once) message delivery capabilities, ensuring that business critical data is available and ready in real-time wherever it’s needed. This is all done whilst managing the installation and maintenance of the underlying infrastructure and software, helping to reduce operational overheads without compromising on reliability, security and performance regardless of use case. 

According to the IBM Institute for Business Value, 83% of executive agree that modernizing their applications and data is central to the business strategy of their operations. While this shift in the way in which applications are built, deployed and hosted can facilitate change and provide new customer experiences, it can also present a connectivity challenge for businesses. When trying to connect an ever-changing variety of disparate apps hosted across different Cloud providers and on-premises, the resulting silos can make it difficult to effectively leverage their data and derive maximum value. IBM MQ can connect these siloed apps dynamically, securely and reliably enabling businesses to build loosely coupled message-driven and event-driven application architectures. By loosely coupling their apps, businesses can make changes, scale or introduce new apps with a minimized risk of impacting other downstream apps or dependencies. 

IBM MQ as a Service Reserved Instance was officially announced on 8th October 2024 and will be Generally Available on 13th December 2024. This new plan compliments and builds upon the existing multi-tenant plans by providing additional high-availability and deployment options. Find out more about the different MQ SaaS plans here and read on to understand more about the key benefits of the new service.

By deploying IBM MQ as SaaS, businesses can gain all the benefits of digital transformation and drive change without having to worry about the costly and time-consuming management of the underlying infrastructure and runtime. New queue managers can be provisioned in minutes, helping to respond more quickly to changing business requirements and reduce the time to benefit for new applications. 

Once queue managers are deployed, additional capacity can swiftly be provisioned to account for spikes in workload without having purchase any additional hardware or software licenses. With SaaS, clients now have the flexibility to scale environments up and down based on specific needs or workloads. 

Finally, SaaS means that clients can leverage the latest and greatest functionality that IBM MQ offers as soon as it is available. Lengthy and painful version upgrade projects become a thing of the past with the ability to upgrade to the latest version either through a REST API or through the user interface. Security patching is also automated, ensuring that SaaS queue managers are always up to date and secure from potential vulnerabilities.

Successful cloud migrations require a comprehensive strategy that lays out goals and anticipates challenges. One of these challenges to any cloud modernization project is developing skills in cloud-native technologies. Having to invest in training staff to become familiar with cloud-native technologies can significantly increase the cost, complexity and timeline of any cloud modernization project. By using IBM MQ as a Service, this challenge is eliminated by reducing requirement for skills like cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes, leading to a faster ROI. This leaves staff free to focus on developing other skills that can provide further competitive advantages. 

IBM MQ as a Service is built from the ground up to incorporate the very best of IBM MQ’s cloud-native technologies, from Native HA to simplified management through to the Operator. This foundation, managed on behalf of the client, enables all the benefits of cloud modernization, but without the operational or skills acquisition overheads.

Adopting DevOps practices like infrastructure-as-code and configuration-as-code are straightforward with IBM MQ as a Service. Infrastructure-as-code automates the provisioning of IBM MQ queue managers through pre-built Terraform modules or REST APIs, making it easier to manage large IBM MQ estates at scale by using the command line, increasing deployment repeatability and developer efficiency. For day two operations, IBM MQ as a Service supports configuration-as-code using Ansible. This allows for tighter configuration version control by holding configuration in a “single source of truth” Github repository which helps to avoid inconsistencies and saves time when applying changes to respond to new business requirements. 

This reduction in operational overheads allows clients to increase the granularity of IBM MQ deployments in line with microservices based architectures. By having a larger number of smaller queue managers, clients can provide a better quality of service by impacting a fewer number of apps when performing upgrades, maintenance or making changes to queue managers.

• Single-tenant infrastructure: Reserved Instance SaaS queue managers run in a dedicated IBM managed cluster, increasing security and reducing the chances of performance being impacted by other workloads. 

• Multi-zone high availability: Data replication across three availability zones with automated failover protects against data loss of persistent messages in the event of a failure. Maintain message connectivity between applications even during upgrades or maintenance as they are performed on a rolling basis across availability zones. 

• Private network endpoints: Protect sensitive message data by providing a higher level of network control and an additional layer of network security so message traffic or endpoints are not exposed to the public internet—this is critical when sending sensitive data across a public cloud.
• Automated deployment and configuration APIs: Optimize the deployment of SaaS queue managers in a repeatable and programmatic way. This allows IBM MQ as a Service to be used at scale, helping save on administration costs, reducing errors and deployment time.

• IBM MQ Advanced capabilities included with SaaS: Protect data in the Cloud with Advanced Message Security (AMS) end-to-end encryption. When running IBM MQ in a public cloud, AMS protects data at rest and inflight against breaches to the underlying server or storage volume—only the intended recipient of the message can decrypt it. Transfer files in an auditable way, regardless of file size or operating system with Managed File Transfer (MFT).

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