Earlier this months at the Gartner ITxpo event, Massimo Pezzini presented the challenges that must be addressed by a pervasive enterprise integration strategy. In summary there are four types of hybrid challenges (see Massimo’s diagram below).
During the fall of 2017, we conducted a microservices survey with our Red Hat Middleware and Red Hat OpenShift customers. Here are eight interesting trends discerned by the results:
There seems to be a strong emphasis in the market by technology vendors for positioning microservices as being only for new projects. However, our survey reveals that organizations are also using microservices to re-architect existing and legacy applications.
Sixty-seven percent of Red Hat Middleware customers and 79 percent of Red Hat OpenShift customers indicated this. This data tells us that microservices offer value to users all along their IT transformation journey — whether they are just looking to update their current application portfolio or are gearing up new initiatives. So, if you are only focused on greenfield projects for microservices, it may be a good idea to also start evaluating your existing applications for a microservice re-architecture analysis. Microservices introduce a set of benefits that our customers have already started seeing, and they are applying these benefits not just to new projects but to existing ones as well.
The big question is always, “Do we car manufacturers learn to become tech companies more quickly than a tech company learns to be an automotive player?”
That is quite a statement. When a leading car manufacturer worries about being disrupted by a technology company, you know something big is going on. No wonder so many companies are talking about disruption these days.
There is a big transition taking place. And it is not just about competition. Or innovation. Or value migration. Or the creation of new markets. It is about the fact that every company is becoming a technology company, and only those that embrace this will survive, thrive, and shape our world. Software is at the core of this change, and increasingly it appears that the cloud is where much of this is going to take place.
Customers often come to us asking, “How can I be faster? How can I innovate and lead, instead of repeat and follow? How can I do that with enterprise-grade security, reliability and resiliency?”
A good part of the answer lies in using the cloud to power business models and help run, migrate, or scale existing applications, or develop new cloud-native ones. Red Hat has offered platforms to run customers’ applications and infrastructure in the cloud for a number of years. Today, we are taking another step forward by offering cloud-native application runtimes and frameworks, fully supported and enterprise grade.
Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes offers a curated selection of popular cloud-native application runtimes and frameworks that are well-suited for enabling cloud-native application development.
In the words of Joe Dickman, senior vice president of Vizuri, “Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes establishes a foundation for building services for hybrid and multi-cloud application and systems […] in a myriad of environments using their preferred tools.”
With Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes, organizations can innovate directly in the cloud, from inception to production; running in the industry’s most comprehensive Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and in a cloud provider of choice.
James Chinn, CEO at Shadow-Soft, adds: “With Red Hat’s latest support of Wildfly Swarm, Spring Boot, and NodeJS, our customers can feel confident building and scaling containerized workloads on OpenShift. Openshift deployed in a public cloud gives our customers the flexibility and agility to deploy an enterprise and container framework quickly and easily.”
When customers develop an application strategy for moving to the cloud, they have to choose the right runtimes, based on factors such as existing skills or the right framework for the application they need to create.
“Historically, one of the biggest challenges has been the roadmap necessary for change in legacy environments,” says Chris Hart, chief technology officer of Levvel. “OpenShift Application Runtimes helps simplify that transformation and lowers the effort and risks to getting started with cloud-native development.”
They need to decide which applications to move to the cloud and how to keep evolving and innovating. What applications get a lift-and-shift (rehost) versus reshape or re-architect? Should they create “fast monoliths” or decompose them, totally, or partially, as microservices? If so, what is the right framework for the job?
Erik Melander, EVP of solutions at Kovarus, expands on this: “Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes […] reduces friction by packaging and supporting a curated set of open application runtimes and letting developers make the right choice for cloud-native development.”
It is also important for them to learn about containers and how to implement DevOps methodologies and culture. Development and operations teams may need to learn new skills and change the way they work.
We are happy to have a large network of partners around the world with the expertise to support our customers along the exciting path of going to the cloud. From the top level strategy and innovation consulting, down to the most detailed testing and infrastructure set up. From defining and helping implement an application modernization strategy, to helping implement and deploy a microservices architecture.
Red Hat solution systems integrators and solution providers can help select the right option based on the technical objectives, existing skills or strategy. They can also help customers prepare for the challenges of complex microservices architectures and equip an organization to adopt DevOps practices and culture.
Start your journey here!
Supporting quotes:
“For our customers that are developing applications to create and sustain competitive advantage, developer productivity is an ever-present challenge. We are excited to see Red Hat addressing this problem with the launch of Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes, which reduces friction by packaging and supporting a curated set of open application runtimes and letting developers make the right choice for cloud-native development.”
Erik Melander, EVP of Solutions at Kovarus
“We’re excited about Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes because it simplifies the adoption of beneficial technologies for our enterprise customers. Many companies know they need to achieve higher release velocity and improved reliability using approaches like microservices architecture and more modern development and operations tools. Historically, one of the biggest challenges has been the roadmap necessary for change in legacy environments. The OpenShift Application Runtimes help simplify that transformation and lowers the effort and risks to getting started with cloud-native development. We’re looking forward to seeing this accelerate our customers’ success.”
Chris Hart, Chief Technology Officer, Levvel
“We are excited about the announcement of Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes as it signals Red Hat’s continual commitment to meeting our customers where they are today and positioning them for success in the future. With Red Hat’s latest support of Wildfly Swarm, Spring Boot and NodeJS, our customers can feel confident building and scaling containerized workloads on OpenShift. Openshift deployed in a public cloud gives our customers the flexibility and agility to deploy an enterprise and container framework quickly and easily. And like any public cloud deployment, you can start small and scale elastically as workloads demand.”
James Chinn, CEO, Shadow-Soft
“Organizations that are investing time and resources in cloud-native architectures must look at leveraging containerized workloads to provide a robust, flexible and reliable infrastructure that can respond quickly to changing customer needs. Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes establishes a foundation for building services for hybrid and multi-cloud application and systems in a programmable way that provision and decommission infrastructure and applications resources in a myriad of environments using their preferred tools.”
Joe Dickman, Senior Vice President, Vizuri
On May 2, 2017, we announced a new open source project called Syndesis.io. Syndesis.io provides a low code environment for agile integration. We also demonstrated key capabilities at the Red Hat Summit 2017 keynote.
Building on our foundational work in Syndesis.io, we have expanded those capabilities into a new product and are happy to announce Red Hat Fuse Online as a technical preview.
Red Hat 3scale API Management Platform simplifies the integration between the APIcast gateway and Red Hat Single Sign-On through OpenID Connect (OIDC) for API authentication. Consequently, the new version enables API provider users to select and configure their API authentication process from the admin portal UI.
Eclipse MicroProfile, an open forum to collaborate on enterprise Java™ microservices, today announced the release of Eclipse MicroProfile 1.2.
Eclipse MicroProfile 1.2, which builds on the 1.1 version, updates the config API and adds the health check, fault tolerance, metrics, and JWT propagation APIs.
**This post was updated on September 26, 2018.**
If you Google the term “agile integration,” you’ll come up with about 30 million results, but they focus heavily on one area: continuous integration within agile development. That definition of agile integration is based on the build environment.
However, it is possible to have another definition for “agile integration,” one that looks at the platform architecture.
In this definition, “agile” doesn’t relate to the process or the infrastructure, but to the flexibility and adaptability–the agility–of the application architecture. Integration within this context has a more strategic role, as the architectural framework that defines the interoperability of services and with a focus on the application functionality.
Check out this e-book to learn more about Agile Integration: The Blueprint for enterprise architecture.
There are functional similarities between traditional integration and agile integration – like routing, connectivity, and orchestration capabilities. The difference between traditional enterprise application integration and agile integration is not in the tasks performed, but in the strategic perspective of those tasks. Put simply, integration can be viewed as a necessary but often limited part of the infrastructure (traditional) or it could be viewed as the core framework of the application architecture (agile).
If you’ve been following the news about Oracle’s new direction for Java EE, you’ll know that one of the motivations for changing the governance and process is to move Java EE forward in a more agile and responsive manner.
So it’s a good sign that within a month of initially announcing their intentions, Oracle (with help from IBM and Red Hat) have chosen the Eclipse Foundation as the future home for Java EE. You can read Oracle’s announcement here.
This is a pretty important, first, tangible step in moving Enterprise Java forward and it’s encouraging to see Oracle moving ahead at a rapid pace. Java EE is an established technology that many organizations depend on for their business critical applications. Java EE is also a large body of work with Technology Specifications, Reference Implementations and TCKs from multiple vendors and open source projects so there’s still a significant amount of work yet to happen – but this is a great start.
Oracle’s announcement to move Java EE to an Open Source foundation has already begun to energize the community, offering the opportunity to more quickly evolve the platform to meet modern workloads. The Eclipse Foundation will be significant enabler in that evolution and Red Hat fully supports Oracle’s decision. Eclipse already hosts many projects of a similar size and complexity as Java EE, and we’re confident that the many years of experience and expertise the Eclipse Foundation has with other Java technologies ensures that this will be a successful move.
MicroProfile is also an Eclipse Foundation project and Red Hat hopes this will make it easier to align Java EE and MicroProfile in the future. The MicroProfile project was started in June 2016 as a collaboration between Red Hat, IBM, Tomitribe, Payara and others in the Java community with the goal of making Enterprise Java more relevant to developers building cloud-native applications.
Red Hat is an Eclipse Foundation member and has worked with the Eclipse Foundation for many years on projects as diverse as JBossTools, IoT, Kapua, Vert.x and Che and we look forward to working with with Oracle, IBM, The Eclipse Foundation and others on the future of Java EE.
At this stage the future of Java EE looks brighter than it has for quite a while as Oracle, working with Red Hat, IBM, other vendors and the wider community to move the specifications, TCKs and overall innovation to an open source foundation. I think in general most people in the Java community see this as positive but there are a few naysayers, even more of them in other non-JVM areas. The common thread throughout is along the lines of “who cares these days?” or “it’s far quicker and easier to accomplish the same things with framework X or language Y, anyway.” I’m not going to try to address all of the concerns which have been raised because many of the comments I’ve seen have clearly been subjective and bordering on click bait. However, I’m writing this piece to reiterate some things I’ve said over the years and which remain just as relevant today, in my opinion
I want to start though by saying that in all of this I am trying to remain objective. Of course in my current role I and Red Hat have a vested interest in Java EE but if you’ve known me long enough over the years you’ll know that I’m also a scientist and as such I base my opinions on observations and facts born out by those observations. If a fact or piece of data goes against a theory then I don’t ignore it, I review and likely update or replace the theory to match the facts. I’ve changed my opinion on many things throughout my career and I’m sure I will do so again.
OK so back to Java EE. Does this move to open source help the wider community? Is Java EE still relevant or has it had its day like so many technologies before it? I’m not going to link to other things I’ve written on Java EE and its future over the years as they’re easily searchable through your favourite engine. But in short, many people forget that Java EE represents an evolution of essential middleware capabilities which many mission critical applications require. It’s had a lot of bad press since its inception, some of it accurate and some of it less so. I think one of its big failings is that, like my favourite topic of transactions, it has been used and misused in environments where it wasn’t really appropriate. No stack or framework is going to be applicable to every problem space and of course developers are going to get frustrated if they try it and find it wanting and failing as a result.
