Modern application development often involves a healthy dose of integration technologies and approaches that bring together different data sets and capabilities.
In an effort to make the integration process easier to work with, Red Hat is launching a new bundled offering aptly called Red Hat Integration, which combines the company’s integration technologies. Red Hat is also launching online versions of its integration technologies including AMQ and Fuse Online, as well as adding multiple new capabilities across the integration portfolio that further enable cloud-native development.
“We’re finding that customers are building integration architectures that include capabilities from multiple products, so we created a dedicated SKU and brought all of the capabilities from our integration portfolio together into a single product,” Sameer Parulkar, integration manager at Red Hat, told eWEEK. “All of these pieces are tied together in a more unified way, managed via a familiar interface.”
The products that are part of Red Hat Integration include Red Hat Fuse, Red Hat AMQ and Red Hat 3scale API Management. Parulkar said that Red Hat is aiming for a quarterly release cadence for Red Hat Integration, so the bundles will include all of the new features and updates that are released in the individual products within that time period.
AMQ
Red Hat AMQ is based on the open-source Apache ActiveMQ message broker technology. While there has been on-premises versions of AMQ available in the past, Red Hat is now launching an AMQ online service as well. Parulkar explained that AMQ Online is not separate from Red Hat AMQ, but rather provides customers with a different way to manage their application messaging needs. AMQ Online is available on OpenShift Container Platform and provides a self-service, browser-based experience. It is based on the EnMasse upstream project.
Red Hat is also including AMQ Streams into the integration bundle. AMQ Streams is Red Hat’s enterprise version of the popular open-source Apache Kafka project.
“With AMQ Streams, we have specifically added capabilities to run Apache Kafka services on Kubernetes, via the open-source Strimzi project,” Parulkar said. “Though it can run on other Kubernetes platforms, or even in non-containerized environments, we have optimized it for running on OpenShift Container Platform and harnessing the additional benefits of an OpenShift-native experience.”
Fuse
A core element of the Red Hat Integration platform is Fuse, which is Red Hat’s distributed integration platform. Parulkar said that Fuse actually includes all of the capabilities of Red Hat AMQ.
“Integration and messaging often go hand-in-hand, where an integration service or API developed in Red Hat Fuse can take advantage of real-time messaging via Red Hat AMQ,” he said. “Red Hat AMQ can be used stand alone if the customer is only looking for core messaging capabilities.”
Parulkar commented that integration has historically been addressed late in the development cycle but that Red Hat has advocated for integration to come earlier in the development cycle, and built Red Hat Fuse with the core application developer in mind. Starting with Red Hat Fuse 7, which was launched in June 2018, Red Hat has introduced new capabilities into the platform that are tailored for a wider group of users.
“The dev tools and capabilities are still there for the core application developers,” Parulkar said. “But we also now provide tools that are suited for integration professionals, as well as the so-called citizen integrator who will be much more comfortable accessing integration capabilities from a browser, and be able to create integrations via a low-code, drag-and-drop interface.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.