When you are modernizing, having the flexibility to choose where you deploy is important. If you are modernizing your existing on-premises systems with APIs, you can deploy API Connect on-premises using Kubernetes, OpenShift, or VMware.

The following is an OpenShift screenshot showing pods in a user-friendly interface:

Figure 1.9 – RedHat OpenShift platform

The OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) provides the container orchestration layer for API Connect. API Connect is built on microservices and running on top of OCP allows your organization to choose which cloud provider to use. You can run OpenShift on-premises or on any of the major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure, or IBM Cloud). OpenShift includes an enterprise-grade Linux operating system, container runtime, networking, monitoring, a registry, and authentication and authorization solutions.

The following is a screenshot of the OpenShift Cluster management screen. You can see that it provides critical information for an administrator to understand the health of the cluster and what activities are running:

Figure 1.10 – OpenShift Cluster overview

If your company is leaning toward containerization in your digital journey, then OpenShift or Kubernetes are excellent options. If you’re taking advantage of IaaS or PaaS, you can install API Connect on the IBM Cloud or as a reserved instance where your instance of API Connect is managed separately from a shared instance.

One of the PaaS options is Cloud Pak for Integration, which is part of IBM Automation. Cloud Pak for Integration (CP4I) is a powerful integrated platform for deploying containerized integration capabilities as part of an OpenShift deployment environment. By making use of CP4I, an organization can connect applications, systems, and services quickly and simply as part of a managed, controlled, scalable, and secure environment. This includes the following:

  • IBM App Connect Enterprise
  • IBM API Connect
  • IBM DataPower Gateway Virtual Edition
  • IBM MQ and IBM MQ Advanced
  • IBM Event Streams and Confluent OEM (add-on)
  • IBM Aspera High-Speed Transfer Server

The following is a screenshot of CP4I:

Figure 1.11 – IBM Cloud Pak for Integration

These capabilities of CP4I (excluding API Connect) are not covered in this book because they support other capabilities and functionality that are not part of API Connect. If you would like to learn more, then there is plenty of information on the web regarding CP4I. You can start by going to the official website: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloud-pak-for-integration.

Summary

For some time now, digital transformation and digital modernization have been discussed in countless articles and references. There has been a success in these transformations, as well as many failures. At the beginning of this chapter, you were provided with background knowledge of the driving influences of businesses and how improvements in technology have driven new business practices. By understanding how the 7Ps of marketing (price, product, place, promotion, passion, people, and process) has led digital transformation and modernization into a holistic consolidation where all the parts of the organization work toward a common goal. By understanding your customers and taking advantage of new ways of doing business through digital technology, you learned that organizations can be more agile, run more efficiently, and produce products at a high level of efficiency and creativity so that consumers will react passionately about your product and do the promotion for you.

You learned that, of the many ways to modernize, APIs become the flexible glue that ties the solutions together. APIs are apparent at many levels of your architecture. Of the three major layers of APIs (UX APIs, process/interactive APIs, and system APIs), you learned that API Connect is dominant in the latter two by providing important management capabilities that follow the digital transformation’s holistic practice.

In the latter half of this chapter, you were provided with more details on how API Connect supports your digital transformation. You were introduced to how API Connect can be installed on various platforms that follow your modernization efforts, whether that be on-premises, on cloud platforms using Kubernetes, or with OpenShift/Cloud Pak for Integration. By learning about all the available options, you now have choices that you can map to your strategic goals.

You are now at a point where having a deeper insight into API Connect will give you the tools to begin building, deploying, securing, and managing your digital transformation with APIs. The next chapter will provide that introduction.

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