Red Hat today unveiled a range of new integration tools across its sprawling portfolio suite. These include tools to support end-to-end API lifecycle management, messaging infrastructure management – via a new browser-based offering dubbed AMQ Online – and a series of upgrades/integrations to its low-code platform Fuse Online.
Senior solutions architect Erica Langhi told Computer Business Review in a call: “Customers don’t want to have to go to developers every single time to integrate; people want some self-service. We are trying to introduce web-based UI to do more with less code; from the development point of view it’s going to be quite exciting.”
The releases come as Red Hat continues its push to try and own the enterprise hybrid cloud space; a major strategic drive of new owner IBM.
As GlobalData’s Charlotte Dunlap, Principal Analyst, Application Platforms, earlier put it to Computer Business Review: “Once hybrid cloud set-ups are in play and enterprises move into the digital transformation phase which converts their IT and data centers into modern app development/deployment architectures, operations teams (DevOps) are pinning a lot of hopes on OSS technologies, such as Kubernetes, Istio, and Knative, to ease the complexity of moving app workloads into production.”
Red Hat Integration Push
Upgrades to Fuse Online include APIs for enterprise data sources like Google Calendar and Slack, enabling the platform to send and receive events and messages; Apache Kafka, to help connect to data streams; and – available as a technology preview at this stage – access to Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resource-based healthcare data.
(FHIR is an interoperability standard for the healthcare industry that includes a standardised API; a move that will ultimately allow developers to create plug-and-play apps that can interface with any electronic health record.)
Other releases flagged by Red Hat today include tools for cloud-based self-service messaging, and event-streaming for cloud-native applications. Some of these were already on the market, for example AMQ Streams, first announced November last year.
APIs + Containers = Agility, says Red Hat
“Using an architecture based on containers, APIs and distributed integration, organizations can improve business agility by moving core connectivity and operations tasks away from individual applications and into the platform,” Red Hat said in a release.
The company said a range of customers including Amsterdam Airport Schiphol have been adopting the integration tools, with the airport using them to exchange data between the Airport Operational DataBase (AODB) and APIs running in the cloud, enabling the airport to develop and deploy new customer-facing services faster.
In Use in Amsterdam…
Arie van der Veek, technology lead, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol said: “Schiphol aims to provide open data through APIs. Our flight API, for example, exposes flight information like departure time and boarding gate to passengers and partners.”
He added: “We need innovative technology to deliver APIs in a robust, scalable and more secure manner. We developed our API in two weeks with three developers using Red Hat Fuse deployed on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. This allowed us to accelerate development from months to weeks.”
