Red Hat Delivers iPaaS via Kubernetes
Red Hat today at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit announced that its low-code Fuse integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) based on the Apache Camel open source project is now natively integrated with the distribution of Kubernetes that underpins the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
In addition, Red Hat unfurled Fuse Online, a low-code instance of its iPaaS environment that is made available as a cloud service.
Sameer Parulkar, a senior product marketing manager for Red Hat, says tighter integration with Kubernetes will make it easier for IT organizations to embed iPaaS functionality directly within a microservices-based application regardless of whether the application is deployed in a public cloud or in an on-premises environment. That approach will reduce the amount of overhead that otherwise would be encountered using other iPaaS environments or relying on a traditional enterprise service bus (ESB), says Parulkar.
This latest version of Fuse also adds more than 50 new connectors for big data, cloud services and SaaS endpoints. IT organizations also can build their own connectors or leverage connectors developed by Red Hat partners.
Parulkar says Fuse is designed to be deployed alongside Red Hat 3scale API Management, an application programming interface (API) management platform that Red Hat acquired in 2016. Red Hat acquired FuseSource, the original developer of the Fuse code base, in 2012. Last month, Red Hat released version 2.2 of the Red Hat 3Scale platform, which added graphical tools for configuring policies in addition to policy extensibility and shareability, and expanded support for Transport Layer Security (TLS).
Fuse Online gives organizations access to a cloud-based service designed to appeal more to so-called citizen developers who would prefer to rely on graphical tools surfaced in a low-code environment. Given the backlog of application development projects, Parulkar says many organizations are relying more on citizen developers to create applications. In many instances, those low-code environments are reusing components that professional developers created on an iPaaS environment before making them accessible to citizen developers within Fuse Online.
But even when citizen developers do create their own integrations, Parulkar says professional developers can still drill down into that code to address any potential performance issues that might arise. That capability addresses much of the criticism professional developers have about low-code environments that are often viewed as “black boxes,” which create integrations that fail to scale over time.
In the meantime, deploying an iPaaS environment on top of Kubernetes will go a long way toward fostering hybrid cloud computing, Parulkar says, because instances of the Kubernetes container orchestration engine platform can be deployed anywhere.
In fact, he notes that in the age of microservices, the way integration is achieved will be utterly transformed. Rather than trying to integrate everything via a cloud service, organizations will be able to pick and choose the precise connectors they require at any given moment. The end result is a much more agile approach to integration that can be tightly coupled to any continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform, Parulkar says.
It may take a while longer for this new era of microservices-based granular integration to fully play out. But once it does, the way IT organizations approach integration will never be the same again.
