Deploying Designer and Toolkit integrations in the App Connect Dashboard

The App Connect Dashboard provides a runtime environment for hosting your deployed integrations in production environments. From your App Connect Dashboard instance, you can deploy Designer integrations or Toolkit integrations either to integration servers or to integration runtimes. You can also deploy custom IBM® App Connect server Docker images to integration servers or integration runtimes.

About this task

The Integration Server and Integration Runtime resource types both enable you to run an integration solution as an always-on deployment, which is always running or available in your cluster. Integration runtimes additionally support serverless deployment of Designer API flows, which enables resources to be provisioned on demand, and OpenTelemetry tracing of Toolkit flows for observability. The IBM Cloud Pak for Integration Operations Dashboard tracing component, which is supported for integration servers, is not supported for integration runtimes.

Note: In the Dashboard, integration runtimes run as always-on deployments. Serverless Knative Service deployments, which run Designer API flows only, are not supported in the Dashboard and can be created only from the Red Hat® OpenShift® web console, or Red Hat OpenShift or Kubernetes CLI.

Integration servers and integration runtimes can co-exist in the same namespace in your cluster, but cannot co-exist in a single view in an App Connect Dashboard instance. The configured display mode (of IntegrationServers or IntegrationRuntimes) for the Dashboard determines whether you can view and deploy only integration servers or integration runtimes.

To deploy a Designer integration, you can use one or more BAR files from any of these environments:

  • A broker archive (BAR) file that you exported from an App Connect Designer instance in your cluster
  • A BAR file that you developed as a hybrid by using both App Connect Designer and IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit

To deploy a Toolkit integration, you can use one or more BAR files that were developed by using the IBM App Connect Enterprise Toolkit.