After several technical previews over the last few months, Red Hat Fuse is officially available. This is a significant release, both for Fuse itself and for integration platforms, because it represents a shift from more traditional, on-premise, centralized integration architecture to distributed, hybrid environment integration architecture.
Integration itself has historically been a bottleneck for infrastructure design and changes. The integration points were largely centralized and controlled by a central team in an attempt to manage dependencies and standardize data management between applications. However, that centralization also made change difficult, and it was governed more by procedure and bureaucracy than business innovation. As with traditional infrastructure architecture more generally, integration has not historically been an agile or adaptive architecture.
Red Hat Fuse (and related community projects) is the beginning of a departure from traditional, rigid integration platforms to more agile, distributed integration design. Fuse introduces three major features in the latest release:
- Fuse Online, fully hosted Fuse applications and integrations. Fuse Online provides immediate access to the functionality of Fuse, without having to install and configure it on-premise. Developers can begin testing and customizing integrations immediately. Connectors can be uploaded to the online development area to allow even more integrations.
- Fuse container images for Red Hat OpenShift. Fuse runs natively on OpenShift, allowing local, containerized integration points to be created in development teams and to be designed, tested, and updated within DevOps workflows as part of the overall application development cycle.
- A drag-and-drop UI for integration pattern design. While integration development is typically done within IT teams, integration design relies on business knowledge. Business managers and analysts need to be able to collaborate effectively with their development teams. The new Fuse Ignite UI (based on the Syndesis.io project) is a lowcode way to develop integration — business users can use design elements to create integration architectures and to work with their development teams, within the same tool set.
These three features allow more agile integration development. Fuse installations can span online, on-premise, or container based environments without reducing functionality. This allows an integration platform that crosses environments, and be as lightweight and decentralized as an individual development team or an enterprise-wide platform. The lowcode UI allows business users to be brought directly into the application development cycle, enabling business logic to be incorporated into the integration application design from the beginning.
Additionally, Fuse 7 contains these new features:
- Support for Spring Boot deployment for Fuse applications
- 50 new application connectors (with a total of over 200 included connectors)
- A new monitoring subsystem
- Updated component versions, including new versions of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Apache Camel
- A new name (Red Hat Fuse, rather than Red Hat JBoss Fuse)
Additional Resources
- Check out the “Hello, World” examples for developers: https://developers.redhat.com/products/fuse/hello-world/?onebox=fuse
- Read the documentation: https://access.redhat.com/products/red-hat-fuse
- Try guided tutorials with OpenShift: https://learn.openshift.com/middleware
- Get involved with the community: