Red Hat Extends OpenShift Integration Reach
Red Hat announced today that the suite of integration tools it provides will now include support for Apache Camel K, a lightweight framework that integrates Kubernetes clusters with the open source Apache Kafka distributed event streaming platform.
Apache Camel codifies common enterprise integration patterns along with hundreds of connectors. Previously available from Red Hat as a technology preview, the Camel K project builds on that foundation to provide an instance of the framework that runs natively on Kubernetes to make it possible to interact with Apache Kafka events.
Camel K also provides access to Kamelets, which enables developers to declaratively configure interactions using connectors. They extract the connection logic required and replace it with visual forms that collect only the necessary information, such as location and security parameters.
The definitions are encoded in standardized forms like YAML so they can be opened and configured with visual tools. Once configured, the connections are available for use in Camel routes, either graphically or using a domain-specific language (DSL). Camel K is built on Quarkus, Red Hat’s open source Java framework for Kubernetes and serverless environments.
In addition to adding support for Apache Camel K, Red Hat also launched Red Hat AMQ Interconnect 2.0, which is based on the Apache Qpid project. It provides access to a lightweight AMQP message router for building scalable messaging networks. This latest addition adds a development preview of a service network capability that links services across hybrid cloud environments made up of Red Hat OpenShift clusters running in different network locations. That capability enables IT teams to connect geographically distributed services as if they were all running at the same site using the Skupper command line interface (CLI) that Red Hat provides for Kubernetes and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Finally, Red Hat is making available version 1.5 of the Debezium project, an open source distributed change data platform that captures row-level database changes in a way that enables applications to immediately respond. The latest release of Debezium expands the support for the Red Hat Integration Service Registry, as well as adding support for transaction metadata to MySQL databases. The metadata support means that events emitted by Debezium can include transaction initiations, commits, and rollbacks.
Sameer Parulkar, director of product marketing for Red Hat integration products, says the goal is to make it simpler for organizations to incorporate the Red Hat OpenShift platform within an event-driven architecture based on Apache Kafka. While event-driven architectures have been employed to varying degrees for decades, Parulkar notes that, with the rise of edge computing, the need for event-driven architectures within highly distributed computing environments is becoming more apparent.
Integrating multiple systems across an extended event-driven IT environment will become easier as the number of Kamelets being registered in the Kamelet catalog, which includes connectors to many databases, applications and SaaS applications, continues to rapidly expand, Parulkar adds.
As the Red Hat OpenShift platform becomes more widely deployed, the overall sophistication of the distributed computing environment that it enables IT teams to create is increasing. As more data is processed and analyzed at the points where it is being created and consumed, the number of organizations that will deploy event-driven applications will undoubtedly increase. Less clear is to what degree those IT teams might understand, or even recognize, them for what they are until otherwise informed.
