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IBM has announced two new services for IBM Cloud—IBM Active Deploy and IBM Event Hub to help developers run updates with no downtime.
The new services help developers avoid disruption to apps when deploying updates, eliminate complexity from manual processes, and integrate data from sources of real-time information.
IBM Active Deploy, now available on IBM’s Bluemix Platform as a Service, enables developers to deploy software updates to cloud-based apps with zero downtime and no service disruption. The new continuous delivery DevOps service enables development teams to produce software updates in short cycles and be confident they can deploy these updates seamlessly and invisibly. For core business applications, even a few minutes of downtime can mean lost revenues and a sharp drop in customer satisfaction, IBM said.
The IBM Event Hub solution, a beta service on Bluemix, brings together events generated by a variety of Web services or on-premises systems into a centralized, cloud-based system. Multiple event streams can easily be aggregated within the Bluemix Message Hub, while still keeping data separate, organized and easily accessible. IBM Event Hub is initially launching with four connectors to enable integration of some of the largest sources of data into apps: Twitter, Salesforce, Cloudant and MQ Light.
Just last week, Big Blue announced the availability of IBM Streaming Analytics and IBM Message Hub as services on the IBM Cloud.
These tools are based on the popular Apache Kafka messaging engine and are designed to work together to make it easier for developers to integrate external data into their apps, as well as visualize and continuously analyze this data.
Both services are available to developers on Bluemix.
IBM’s Streaming Analytics service, powered by IBM Streams, can analyze millions of events per second to enable sub-millisecond response times and instant decision-making. Streaming Analytics gives developers a more efficient way to visualize data, and will help expand the use of data analytics to a much broader base of users throughout businesses, IBM said. This recent addition to the Bluemix services portfolio helps organizations spot opportunities and risks across all data incoming from their systems and operations.
Meanwhile, IBM Message Hub also is now available as a new Bluemix service in beta. Message Hub provides scalable, distributed, high-throughput, asynchronous messaging for cloud applications. Message Hub offers the choice of using a REST or Apache Kafka API to communicate with other applications, and builds on Kafka, a fast, scalable and durable real-time messaging engine developed for the Apache Software Foundation, to bring this popular open source messaging offering to the Bluemix platform in the form of a service, IBM said.
Originally developed at LinkedIn, Apache Kafka is used for large-scale message processing. Developers can use any language that supports HTTPS to interact with the Message Hub Kafka interface, which gives them the flexibility to work in a variety of different languages for different microservices. Message Hub also is useful for building apps in a microservices architecture. This makes it easy for developers to scale apps and deploy changes to individual microservices, without having to recycle the entire application for every minor change.