To begin, let’s first define multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is a term for the use of more than one public cloud service provider for virtual data storage or computing power resources, with or without any existing private cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Multi-cloud is different than hybrid cloud, which involves the use of public cloud in conjunction with private cloud.

Multi-cloud service providers may host three types of services:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Known as the fundamental building blocks of cloud, IaaS is comprised of highly automated and scalable compute resources augmented by virtually unlimited cloud storage and network capability. IaaS provides the freedom to choose the configuration, can be self-provisioned, metered, and is available on demand.
• Software as a Service (SaaS): Similar to the client-server model, where the client is typically a web browser, SaaS provides an interface to the application that is running on the server. SaaS moves software management and deployment to third-party services.
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS provides a platform for application development and deployment in an environment that is abstracted from the operating system, server software, as well as the underlying server hardware and network infrastructure. PaaS provides a full lifecycle of services required to provision, run, and support your infrastructure.

Why use a multi-cloud strategy?

While some organizations are still exploring the viability of a cloud strategy, others have moved to scale up on their deployments and create multi-cloud environments. The breadth of services, cost savings, business agility, and innovation opportunities help organizations compete in crowded markets.

Other distinct benefits include:

• Unique Services: Organizations have the freedom to choose from different cloud providers to best fit specific application and/or business needs.
• Scalable: An enterprise can quickly scale according to fluctuations in demand.
• Availability and Performance: Regional public clouds optimize availability, performance, and resource efficiency.
• Compliance with governmental regulation: New and existing regulations will restrict how and where companies can store data in the cloud. A multi-cloud strategy can help ensure organizations comply with such rules and regulations.
• Save money and space: Most organizations that employ multi-cloud capabilities use the public cloud for IaaS, avoiding the cost of maintaining and building a datacenter.
• Flexible: Organizations are not limited to the services that one vendor provides. Additionally, organizations that use vendors that offer pay-as-you-go pricing can save significant amounts of money by scaling cloud services up or down according to demand.

Before adopting a multi-cloud strategy, it is important to consider that the use of multiple vendors increases vulnerability. Although public clouds have robust security features, different vendors often use different security monitoring tools, and so it is important to consider adopting a tool or platform that synchronizes and automates security policies.

How to prepare for a multi-cloud deployment

In the journey to the cloud, organizations must go through an auditing, strategy, and minimum viable product (MVP) process to indicate their goals and vision for cloud. In moving to multi-cloud, strategists and technologists undertake similar strategies to ensure the right adoption of tools and resources. An example of these activities may include:

• Understanding the business
• Understanding current applications and infrastructure
• Defining security and associated protocols
• Defining governance and training needs
• Defining resource management and operations
• Defining implementation and automation

It is important to note that organizations that embark on either homogenous or heterogenous cloud implementations can simply deployments by taking advantage of multi-cloud environment management tools (e.g. Kubernetes).

Why Perficient

With a team of more than 200 cloud experts, Perficient is uniquely equipped to help your organization with its multi-cloud strategy. We have expertise with a vast array of platforms, broad solutions portfolios, dedicated industry expertise, and strong partnerships with the world’s leading technology vendors.

Learn more about our cloud practice here.

Enterprises are slowly realizing that they quickly need to adopt cloud-native technologies such as Containers and Kubernetes to accelerate their Digital Transformation initiatives. These technologies are the driving forces behind legacy application modernization and net new cloud-native applications that are needed to meet the ever changing demands of customers. These technologies provide various benefits for both Developers and Operators including:

• Portability: Portability is the key benefit of containers. Write once, package the code in a container image, and run it anywhere.
• Faster releases: Developers can ship the code and release new features faster allowing for better resource utilization on the platform.
• Declarative-style manifest approach: Kubernetes provides operators a consistent declarative-style manifest approach to manage the apps and the related resources/objects.
• Ease of use: Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are also packaging their software as a cloud-native app to help operators easily run and debug their apps on Kubernetes platform.

According to Gartner, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 2022, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% today.

Kubernetes Adoption Journey in an Enterprise

In a typical Enterprise, Containers and Kubernetes adoption is initially slow. Normally, it starts with a small team developing an app (not mission critical) that they plan to containerize and deploy on a k8s cluster in a single environment (typically using Managed CaaS offering on Public clouds) for PoC purpose.

However, when the adoption accelerates, more teams start working on identifying the apps that they would like to containerize and deploy on Kubernetes clusters in various environments (on-premise, Public cloud, or even on bare metal servers). Suddenly, the whole landscape gets crowded.

According to the IDC, Enterprises will build and deploy ~ 500 million apps in Production over next 5 years using cloud-native tools and technologies such as Containers and Kubernetes.

Kubernetes Adoption Reality – Growing Fragmentation

Fragmentation is being seen today within Enterprises. For example, say one team decided to deploy their app(s) on Amazon EKS cluster, and another decided to leverage Google GKE cluster. Although it is good for application teams to have the flexibility to deploy the applications on their choice of Kubernetes clusters, it causes problems for operators.

Operational Challenges with Fragmentation

If your team has struggled to resolve the following questions, you are facing challenges with fragmentation:

• How can we gain visibility into all the clusters from a centralized console?
• How can we troubleshoot containerized workloads across disparate environments?
• How can we quickly enforce Network and Security policies across the board and comply with the Enterprise guidelines?
• How can we efficiently provision the Clusters and manage it’s lifecycle?

Unfortunately, operations tools that companies have today, do not solve these questions. Each vendor provides their own tools to provision clusters, manage it’s lifecycle, and troubleshoot workloads. To solve this problem, you either need to hire an army of resources with a specific skill-set or push your existing resources to learn all these tools to support the infrastructure and app, both of which are not realistic approaches.

However, now there is a better solution, and the solution is VMware Tanzu Mission Control.

What is Tanzu Mission Control?

VMware Tanzu Mission Control (TMC) is a centralized management platform for consistently operating and securing your Kubernetes infrastructure and modern applications across different teams and clouds. As an API-driven service, TMC enables you to declaratively manage all your clusters through its API, the CLI, or the web-based console. From the TMC console, you can see your clusters and namespaces, and organize them into logical groups for easier management of resources, apps, users, and security. Some of the cluster management capabilities of TMC include:

• Cluster Lifecycle Management: Using TMC, you can connect to your own cloud provider account to create new clusters, resize and upgrade them, and delete clusters that are no longer needed. 
• Cluster Observability and Diagnostics: See the health and resource usage for each of your clusters from a single console. View cluster details, namespaces, nodes, and workloads directly from the TMC console. 
• Cluster Inspections: Run preconfigured inspections against your clusters using Sonobuoy to ensure consistency over your fleet of clusters. 
• Data Protection: Back up and restore the data resources in your clusters using Velero to ensure the protection of the valuable data resources in your clusters. 
• Access Control: TMC starts with a secure by default service, and allows you to use federated identity management and apply granular role-based access control to fine tune your security requirements. 
• Policy Management: Rather than manually dealing with the many aspects of managing your Kubernetes resources and the apps that use them, you can create policies to consistently manage your clusters, namespaces, and workloads.

Key Takeaways

VMware Tanzu Mission Control allows you to manage all your Kubernetes clusters–across packaged Kubernetes distributions, managed Kubernetes Services, and DIY footrpints–from a single control point.

If you are an operator, you will have complete visibility into all the clusters, be able to enforce Enterprise policies related to Container registry, Network, Security and more. That allows exceptional control over diverse environment.

If you are developer, you will have the freedom to use modern constructs and self-service access to Kubernetes resources. You do not need to worry about Kubernetes infrastructure but focus on what you do best–writing quality code.

In our previous blog VMware Tanzu: Highlights of the Basic Edition, we explored the benefits of the VMware Tanzu Basic edition and how it is optimal for enterprises at the beginning stages of their application modernization journeys because it allows you to run containerized-off-the-shelf (COTS) workflows on-premise as part of vSphere. In our Key Takeaways of the VMware Tanzu Standard Edition blog, we explored the benefits surrounding the VMware Tanzu Standard Edition and how it builds off of the functionality of the Basic Edition, allowing you to operate a Kubernetes-based container solution across multiple clouds. Today’s blog will focus on the capabilities of Tanzu Advanced.

VMware Tanzu Advanced simplifies and secures the container lifecycle and enables teams to rapidly deliver modern applications at scale, on-premises and in the cloud. Tanzu Advanced achieves this through:

• Full support of Spring Runtime: Spring Runtime is a framework that makes best use of microservices, data pipelines, and distributed systems. Customs apps are automatically packaged with dependencies, containerized, and maintained. When you need base runtimes or preset components, developers can self-serve from a curated catalog of validate open source software.
• Security: Source code provenance in your applications allows for tracking and auditing. Your curated catalog of base runtimes and preset components is always up to date, and application connectivity policies are intelligently enforced. All container images are stored in a private registry, encrypted and, continuously delivered to your Kubernetes clusters across clouds. Also, container networking and service mesh are enabled for consistent, secure connectivity between services.
• Streamlined management of Kubernetes at scale: You can manage your Kubernetes estate from one, central control plane. Management, policy control, and visibility into service connectivity across clouds can be done from a centralized management platform.
• Automatic custom code containerization: Custom code is automatically containerized, and ready-made images and runtimes are always available in a curated, private repository. As a result, you will realize shorter development cycles.

Tanzu Advanced offers the modular capabilities that enable you to build a developer-centric platform for modern apps that works for your organization. Whether your organization is starting out or already has many pieces of the container lifecycle in place, Tanzu Advanced capabilities can be added as needed to address your most pressing challenges today and support your overall modernization journey going forward.

Credit: tanzu.vmware.com

Our team of VMware Tanzu Application Service certified consultants, who have received advanced training at the VMware Tanzu Master Class, are equipped to enable Tanzu on your multi-cloud environment. Contact us today to get started.

Learn more about our VMware partnership

With a team of more than 100 certified experts, Perficient combines the power of VMware technology with strategy and delivery expertise to help solve critical business challenges.

Learn more about our VMware partnership here.

In our previous blog VMware Tanzu: Highlights of the Basic Edition, we discussed the benefits and considerations of implementing VMware Tanzu Basic in your organization. In today’s blog, we will discuss the Standard edition, which builds off of the functionality of the Basic edition, and how it can support your infrastructure and application modernization journey.

Tanzu Standard is for organizations that want to operate a Kubernetes-based container solution across multiple clouds with centralized observability and governance. Whereas Tanzu Basic is tied to vSphere, Tanzu Standard provides you the flexibility to extend a consistent, open source-aligned Kubernetes distribution across on-premises, public cloud(s), and edge.

With open-source aligned Kubernetes, you can run the same distribution across any cloud. Centralized governance allows the platform operator to manage your organization’s Kubernetes footprint across multiple environments with consistent governance over configuration, access, security, and data protection, while providing development teams the freedom to access and build on resources. Additionally, Tanzu Standard includes leading open source projects, Prometheus and Grafana, with out-of-the-box dashboards that emphasize platform monitoring and full VMware support.

With Tanzu Standard, you can avoid operating multiple Kubernetes distributions with varied configuration controls. You will observe consistent deployments and operations across on-premises, public cloud(s), and edge. Tanzu Standard can be deployed as an add-on for vSphere 6.7u3, vSphere 7, or on public clouds. It can also be licensed with VMware Cloud Foundation to deploy Kubernetes as part of a larger, integrated stack. Tanzu Standard’s global control plane is available as SaaS.

Our team of VMware Tanzu Application Service certified consultants, who have received advanced training at the VMware Tanzu Master Class, are equipped to enable Tanzu on your multi-cloud environment. Our quick-start offering involves:

• Configuring TKG and TMC integration
• Setting up TKG in a multi-cloud environment
• Configuring TMC policies to manage K8 clusters
• Configuring ingress for deploying contour
• Ensuring load balances are working
• Backing up cluster in application using Velero
• Deploying a containerized application using HelloWorld
• Migrating an existing containerized app from another platform

Learn more about our VMware partnership

With a team of more than 100 certified experts, Perficient combines the power of VMware technology with strategy and delivery expertise to help solve critical business challenges.

Learn more about our VMware partnership here.

Built on VMware Tanzu Application Service, VMware Tanzu allows organizations to build modernized applications with speed, simplicity, high availability, and control. VMware offers three VMware Tanzu editions to support your organization at any point in your application modernization journey. In this blog, we will focus on the capabilities of Tanzu Basic, but future blogs will explore the Tanzu Standard and Tanzu Advanced editions.

Tanzu Basic is a cost-effective way to begin your infrastructure modernization journey. It allows enterprises to run containerized-off-the-shelf (COTS) workflows on-premise as part of vSphere. Tanzu Basic can be licensed as a bundle with vSphere 7 Ent+ or as an add-on to be deployed on vSphere 6.7u3.

With Kubernetes embedded in the vSphere control plane and integrated into operations via vCenter UI, developers can leverage existing infrastructure and familiar tools while capturing the benefits of the leading container orchestration platform. Kubernetes-based container management allows vSphere users to run VMs and containers side by side while also providing developers self-service access to resources and environment via Kubernetes APIs.

How to get started with Tanzu Basic

Our team of VMware Tanzu Application Service certified consultants, who have received advanced training at the VMware Tanzu Master Class, are equipped to enable Tanzu on your vSphere production deployments. Our quick-start offering involves:

• Installing VMWare Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Management and Workload clusters on vSphere using best practices
• Training operators and developers on how to leverage vSphere UI to create storage, networking, and RBAC policies
• Working closely with the Application Team to containerize existing applications
• Loading the container images either into Harbor or an image registry of your choosing
• Creating Kubernetes manifests (.yaml files) to deploy the applications on the TKG workload cluster

Learn more about our VMware partnership

With a team of more than 100 certified experts, Perficient combines the power of VMware technology with strategy and delivery expertise to help solve critical business challenges.

Learn more about our VMware partnership here.

Enterprises are slowly realizing that they need to adopt Containers and Kubernetes technologies to accelerate their Digital Transformation initiatives. These technologies are the driving forces behind Legacy modernization and Cloud-native applications that are needed to meet the ever changing demands of their customers in today’s Digital era. 

These technologies provide various benefits for both Developers and Operators. Container resolves “This works on my machine” sort of problem for developers. Portability is the key feature of containers. Helps developers ship the code and release new features faster. Kubernetes provides operators a consistent declarative-style manifest approach to manage the apps and other resources. ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) are also packaging their software as a cloud-native app to help operators easily run and debug their apps on Kubernetes platform. 

As per a survey conducted by Gartner, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in Production by 2022, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% today as shown below. 

Kubernetes Adoption Journey in an Enterprise

In a typical Enterprise, Containers and Kubernetes adoption is slow initially. It normally starts with a small team developing an app (not mission critical) that they plan to containerize and deploy on Kubernetes cluster in a single environment (in most of the cases, managed CaaS offering on Public clouds) for PoC purpose. 

However, when the adoption accelerates, more and more teams start working on identifying the apps that they would like to containerize and deploy on Kubernetes clusters in various environments such as on-premise, in public cloud or even on bare metal servers. And all of a sudden, the whole landscape gets crowded as shown below.

As per IDC, Enterprises will build and deploy ~ 500 million apps in Production over next 5 years using cloud-native tools and technologies such as Containers and Kubernetes. 

Kubernetes Adoption Reality – Growing Fragmentation

We are already seeing this reality today within Enterprises. Let’s say, one team decided to deploy their app(s) on Amazon EKS cluster, another decided to leverage Google GKE cluster.  Though It’s good for application teams to have the flexibility to deploy the applications on their choice of Kubernetes clusters. But it brings up a lot of problems for Operators. 

Operational Challenges with Fragmentation

• How can we gain visibility into all the clusters from a centralized console ?
• How can we troubleshoot containerized workloads across disparate environments ?
• How can we quickly enforce Security policies across the board and Compliance requirements ? 
• How can we efficiently provision and manage the Cluster’s lifecycle ?

Unfortunately, operations tools that companies have today, don’t solve the above mentioned problems. Each vendor provides their own tools to provision clusters, manage it’s lifecycle and troubleshoot workloads etc. All of a sudden, you either need to hire an army of resources with a specific skill-set or push your existing resources to learn all these tools to support the infrastructure and app which is not a realistic approach. 

And the Solution to above mentioned problems is – VMware Tanzu Mission Control. 

What is Tanzu Mission Control ?

Tanzu Mission Control(MC) helps companies manage the growing fragmentation efficiently as more and more teams continue to adopt Containers and Kubernetes technologies and start deploying their apps on Kubernetes platform. It’s a SaaS offering from VMware. 

It provides a centralized Management platform to help operators provision new clusters, manage their life-cycle, enforce security policies, troubleshoot workloads, view resource utilization along-with a lot of other exciting features across the board. 

Core Capabilities

Here is the high level overview of existing (highlighted in Orange) and upcoming (highlighted in Dark Red) capabilities of Tanzu Mission Contorl. I’ll dive deeper into existing capabilities in upcoming blog posts. Stay tuned for more updates.

Conclusion

VMware Tanzu Mission Control allows you to manage all your Kubernetes clusters – across packagaed Kubernetes distributions, managed Kubernetes Services and DIY footrpints – from a single control point.

If you’re an operator, you will have complete visibility into all the clusters, be able to enforce Enterprise policies related to Container registry, Network, Security and a lot more across the board. That’s an exception control over diverse environment.

If you’re a developer, you’ll have the freedom to use modern constructs and self-service access to Kubernetes resources. You don’t need to worry about Kubernetes infrastructure but focus on what you do best – writing quality code.

Software vendors uses Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard to to deploy the packaged VMs (appliances) and make the process easier. An OVF package is composed by following files –

.ovf -> It is the XML file that contains the metadata for the OVF package – Name, Hardware requirement and reference to other files in the package.

.mf -> It is a manifest file that contains the SHA256 hash codes of all the files in the package.

.vmdk ->It is the disk image of virtual machine, mainly contains Guest OS, BIOS Boot and EFI(extensible Firmware Interface) System information.

These files are further processed and packaged into a single file, known as OVA file. If you want to look at the contents of these files, leverage the tools such as 7-zip etc. to extract the above mentioned files from OVA. Then you can open .mf and .ovf file using editor of your choice.

Recently we ran into an issue while importing API Connect v2018 OVA(Open Virtual Appliance) files on VMware Hypervisor (ESXi v6.5) using Desktop based client.  As you can see in below screenshot, it was complaining about OVF package

While investigating further, we found out that it’s a known issue – Desktop based client doesn’t support the SHA256 hashing algorithm.

To resolve this, we need to import the OVAs either using vSpehere Web client or ESXi Embeded Host client because both support SHA256. Please see below link for more details.

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2151537

As companies move to Cloud, one of their goals is to equip developers and operations teams to simplify the development, deployment and management of Cloud native applications on Kubernetes platform. Considering these requirements, Google developed and introduced Cloud Code at the Google Next conference this year.

What is Cloud Code

A plugin/extension for Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDEs. Under the hood, it leverages Google’s command line container tools such as skaffold, jib and kubectl to help developers develop, deploy and debug the cloud-native Kubernetes applications quickly and easily. Cloud code provides developers local, continuous feedback on the applications as they build it.

Key Features

Ease of creating Kubernetes Cluster

Cloud Code offers the template based approach to easily create a Kubernetes Cluster with GKE, AWS EKS, Azure and MiniKube.

You can use either of following options to create a cluster with GKE and enable the Istio, CloudRun addons.

• Using Google Kubernetes Engine Explorer, Click on + icon and that will launch the Create Cluster wizard
• Launch the Command Palette and use the command (Cloud Code:Create GKE Cluster) to open the Create Cluster wizard

Ease of Deployment

Cloud Code provides 2 options to deploy an app as shown in below screenshot. Launch command palette(Ctrl + Shift + P) to deploy an app either on local or a remote k8s cluster.

Continuous Deploy option continuously watches the file system for changes to your files (whether it’s Kubernetes manifest or Source code), rebuilds the container image and redeploys the application to Cluster. Automating the development workflow saves a lot of time in development phase and as a result, improves the developer productivity and increases the quality of application.

Ease of Viewing Logs

It provides the capability to View or Stream logs from a running container directly into development environment. You can also view other useful details such as Restart Count, readiness status of containers in a pod etc.

Ease of debugging an application

Cloud Code really made debugging cloud-native applications very easy. Just set your breakpoints, have following entry in Dockerfile and start debugging your application right from your IDE.

ENTRYPOINT ["node", "--inspect=9229", "src/app.js"]

How to Get Started

It’s time to get your hands dirty with above mentioned features. Download, install and setup the following tools on PATH of your local machine. Install Cloud Code plugin/extension and leverage Starter apps on Welcome page as shown in below screenshot, to get started with Cloud Code.

• Visual Studio Code or IntelliJ
• Docker Client
• Kubectl
• Skaffold
• Cloud SDK

This link also provides step by step instructions to get started with Cloud Code using HelloWorld node.js application.

For more detailed explanation and help with building cloud-native solutions, please reach out to one of our sales representatives at sales@perficient.com

IBM API Connect – Product Architecture

IBM API Connect is an integrated offering, which provides customers an end to end API life-cycle (Create, Run, Secure and Manager) experience. It provides capabilities to build model-driven API’s , micro-services using Node.js loopback framework , run them either on-premise or on-cloud, secure and manage the same using management, gateway server and developer portal.

In this blog post, I’ll cover the component description, the sort of data they hold and their interaction with each other at design time and run-time.

Management Server provides tools to interface with various servers and holds following data. It runs Cloud Management Console (used by cloud administrator to create, manage and monitor the cloud and lot of other admin tasks) and API Manager portal (used by API developers, Product managers, admins etc.)

• Configuration (API, Users, Plans, Products etc.)
• Analytics (API usage, performance etc.)

Gateway Server is an entry point for API calls. It processes and manages security protocols and stores relevant user authentication data, provides assembly functions that enables APIs to integrate with various backend endpoints, and pushes analytics data back to the Management server.

IBM API Connect Supports Two Gateways:

MicroGateway – It’s built on node.js and provides enhancement for the authentication, authorization and flow requirements of an API. It is deployed on API Connect collective and has a limited number of policies available to it.

DataPower – Deployed on either virtual or physical Data Power appliance. It has more built-in policies available to it than MicroGateway and can handle enterprise level complex integrations.

Developer Portal – API providers publish the Products and APIs to the developer portal for application developers to access and use. Application developers need to sign up and register their application to use the APIs.

After registering the application, they can the select appropriate plan(collection of REST api operation and SOAP API wsdl operations) to use with their application . They can test the API using the built-in test tool. They can even view analytics information relating to APIs used by the application.

Developer Toolkit – It provides a command line tool, for creating and testing APIs, loopback application that you can run, manage and secure with IBM API Connect. We can use this to script tasks such as continuous integration and delivery.

Install this either from npm or from a management server in your IBM API Connect cloud. Following this link to take a look at available commands.

API Designer – apic edit command runs the API designer and opens in the default web browser. We can leverage Web GUI to create the  Loopback project, OpenAPI (Swagger 2.0) and secure them. We can create a Product/Plan and after testing the API successfully, we can publish the product, loopback application to Bluemix or On-prem instance.

Design-time Interaction

• Management server sends XML Management requests to the Gateway server to flush API specific document cache entries when a user updates the API and publishes the product again.
• Developer Portal sends messages to a Management node to be subscribed to events that occur using the WebHooks subscription service. When an event occurs, a Management server contacts the Developer Portal to inform it that the event occurred and proceeds to send the event data
• API provider can publish products, loopback applications on On-premise API Connect instances using API Connect Collective from API designer. I’ll cover building loopback applications and how to publish those on Bluemix in future blog posts.

Run-time Interaction

• Gateway server makes a call to the Management server to fetch the API configuration data if it doesn’t exist in cache. The Gateway uses the DataPower document cache to save API and Catalog  information for a week. 

• A timed task in Gateway server runs every 15 minutes to check with the Management server to see if anything has changed. If the management server replies that it has, gateway server will refresh the cache entry, otherwise it will not.
• Gateway server sends analytics data back to the Management server. It discards the analytics data when the management server is down
• The gateway server returns stale API/catalog entries if the cache entry has expired and the management server is down.

XSLT is not the ONLY transformation language supported by DataPower. Starting with the firmware version 7.0.0.0, DataPower supports a new transformation technology – Gateway Script, to handle all sorts (API, B2B, Web, Mobile, SOA) of traffic effectively. For more information, please review the documentation.

IBM provides an interactive website that lets you write Gateway Script code and execute on a cloud hosted DataPower Gateway for learning purposes. The website provides many examples that you can test as it is or edit based on your requirements. It also provides separate tabs to modify the sample code, provide request, view Response and logs.

I tested the following use-case in just a few seconds. There was no need to configure services, or policies to test the transformation piece through Gateway Script.

Use-case : Modify incoming JSON request payload (Add new object in Books array)

Step – 1 : Clicked on 1st sample in Code tab, tweaked the request as shown below.

Step-2 : Provided the request in Request tab as shown below. Didn’t modify anything in HTTP headers field.

Step – 3 : View the response using Response tab.

Step – 4 : View the datapower system logs using Logs tab.

In API Connect v 5.0.0.0, Cloud Manager portal doesn’t reflect the auto-generated gateway/application domain name for gateway cluster. If you are planning to configure multiple gateway clusters(E.q. DEV, QA and UAT clusters) on a single management server instance and leverage same gateway server (DataPower appliance) for all, it will auto-create multiple domains on gateway server but you will not have any idea, which domain belongs to which gateway cluster.

You will be wondering , why should I care about auto-generated gateway/application domain? Well, As long as all your API’s are running successfully, no need. But in case of troubleshooting, user-defined policy implementation etc. , you will be interested to know that mapping. Here is the solution, you can leverage before IBM provides this feature on Cloud Manager portal in upcoming release.

Invoke following restful API. Please ensure you are logged into the Cloud Manager portal before invoking this API. As you can see sample response below, Its an array. Each JSON object contains name of gateway cluster and gateway domain along-with other additional fields.

https://<Management server IP address>/cmc/proxy/gatewayClusters

Sample Response

[{
“url”: “https://<Management Server IP>/cmc/proxy/gatewayClusters/56fd840ee4b0e472744d3bbf”,
“id”: “56fd840ee4b0e472744d3bbf”,
“createdAt”: “2016-03-31T20:09:50.541+0000”,
“updatedAt”: “2016-03-31T20:27:04.130+0000”,
“createdBy”: “SYSTEM”,
“updatedBy”: “admin”,
“name”: “DEV_Cluster”,
“hostname”: “<Gateway Server IP>”,
“multiSite”: false,
“servers”: [“/servers/56fd890fe4b0e472744d40c5”],
“port”: 443,
“portBase”: 2443,
“groupId”: 0,
“gatewayDomainName”: “APIMgmt_8641EF0B14”,
“sslProfileId”: “56fd83d2e4b0e472744d3b48”,
“configurationTimestamp”: “2016-03-31T20:27:04.130+0000”
},

{
“url”: “https://<Management Server IP>/cmc/proxy/gatewayClusters/5707cf95e4b068f13ba09023”,
“id”: “5707cf95e4b068f13ba09023”,
“createdAt”: “2016-04-08T15:34:45.140+0000”,
“updatedAt”: “2016-04-08T15:34:45.140+0000”,
“createdBy”: “admin”,
“updatedBy”: “admin”,
“name”: “QA_Cluster”,
“hostname”: “<Gateway Server IP>”,
“multiSite”: false,
“servers”: [“/servers/5707cfbee4b068f13ba09026”],
“port”: 443,
“portBase”: 2443,
“groupId”: 0,
“gatewayDomainName”: “APIMgmt_BE22E5F0BD”,
“sslProfileId”: “56fd83d2e4b0e472744d3b48”,
“configurationTimestamp”: “2016-04-08T15:34:45.218+0000”
}]

Taken from IBM API Connect developer site

IBM recently announced a completely new, re-designed and a unique offering known as API Connect, which integrates IBM API Management and IBM Strong Loop into a single package with built-in gateway, allows you to create, secure, run and manage APIs and Microservices. This offering will certainly help organizations to understand the complete API life cycle in detail and design the overall enterprise architecture in a better way.

Here are a few exciting features:

• Utilize Strong Loop capabilities to rapidly build API’s and Microservices using Node.js – Loopback and Express frameworks.
• Model driven approach to create API’s. Map models to back-end systems using available connectors.
• Unified management and administration of Node.js and Java runtimes.
• Built-in support for Swagger 2.0 on API Manager portal.
• Addition of new built-in policies to speed-up the API development and make developer’s life easy.
• Assemble view on API Manager portal provides a visual tool for composing assembly flows.
• Developer toolkit to interact with API Manager portal.
• Short development cycles and accelerate innovation.
• 3 editions of API Connect -> Essentials, Professional and Enterprise

Take a look at IBM API Connect developer link for more details. IBM is planning to make this release generally available (GA) by 15 March 2016. I’ll share more technical details around this new exciting offering in coming weeks.