What's new in Red Hat Integration

The latest release of Red Hat Integration is now available, and with it we've introduced some exciting new capabilities aimed at helping customers better manage APIs at scale, enhancements for Apache Kafka-based environments, and API policy extensibility.

Red Hat Integration is a comprehensive set of agile and flexible integration and messaging products that provide API connectivity, data transformation, service composition and orchestration, real-time messaging, cross-datacenter message streaming, and API management to connect apps across hybrid architectures and enable API-centric business services.

Managing APIs at scale

As organizations adopt microservices and other cloud-native application development approaches, they are building and implementing more APIs as a result. This is being driven by several trends.

First, from a competitive standpoint businesses need to be agile and capable of delivering new services into production faster. Generally speaking, changes can be made faster when they are made incrementally. Modular architectures based on microservices and containers result in applications composed of fine-grained components that can be enhanced and updated; however, as the number of components increase, so does the number of APIs.

Second, for many industries there is a burgeoning ecosystem of APIs that have themselves become a valuable line of business for companies. For example, leading airlines have expanded their loyalty program services through partners that specialize in hospitality or ground transportation to offer comprehensive benefits to travelers. Partners are able to tap into these services by taking advantage of the airline's APIs, which essentially become offerings that require ongoing iteration, management, monitoring, and security.

To help customers cope with the explosion of APIs and be able to scale their API management and governance to meet these needs, we are introducing an API-as-a-Product capability, where policy and configuration are shared across multiple related APIs, rather than being tied to individual APIs. These policies include things like API keys, policy chains, routing rules, documentation, analytics and more. By implementing a shared configuration, customers can increase the value of their APIs and gain greater flexibility and efficiency in that they do not need to re-enter this information as the number of APIs grows, and they can apply specific configuration to a given API if needed.

Building event-driven enterprises: taking Kafka to the next level

Apache Kafka has gained a fair bit of attention recently—and for good reason. As a distributed data streaming platform, Kafka provides core functionality for building event-driven architectures. Its high speed, high throughput data connectivity capabilities pair well with Kubernetes in enterprise environments where scalability, high availability, portability and easy deployment are important. Recently, the open source Strimzi project, which is a Kubernetes-native Kafka implementation founded by Red Hat, was accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubation-level project.

With the latest release of Red Hat Integration, we are continuing to strengthen our platform for cloud-native Kafka workloads. New features and capabilities in this release include:

• Expanded connectivity options – Access for REST clients has been simplified with HTTP bridge support and built-in API management for Kafka HTTP bridge endpoints.
• Services registry (tech preview) – A schema registry based on the open source Apicurio project is now available in Red Hat Integration. The schema registry includes a set of serialization and deserialization (SerDes) utilities for Apache Kafka clients.
• Change data capture connectors (tech preview) – Debezium connectors for change data capture (CDC) are now available as a technology preview in Red Hat Integration. These connectors are based on the popular Apache Kafka Connect API, and capture changes from MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and SQL Server.
• API policy extensibility (tech preview) – Customers can implement custom API policies with Enterprise Integration Patterns based on Apache Camel. Custom policies can be independently deployed, scaled and managed providing dynamic extensibility to the built-in policy support in Red Hat 3scale API Management.

These features and more are available in Red Hat Integration, and customers can get the latest updates from the Red Hat Customer Portal.