A message about IBM Messaging

During my 4 days stay in Madrid at the IBM technical conference, I attended some interesting sessions about one of my favorite topics: messaging.

The slide below was shown at the start of almost each of these presentations. It summarizes the different messaging solutions available from IBM.

IBM MQ V9 improvements

First session was about the new version of MQ, MQ version 9.

Most important one in my humble opinion is that the CLI interface now supports command recall (up-down arrows) and auto-complete (tab). Thank you! ;-)

Another interesting feature in AMS (advanced message security): the addition of a high performance policy “Confidentiality” with the possibility of key reuse. This provides encryption without digital signing. Proves a significant gain of performance over integrity and privacy.

In MQ version 9, IBM added new monitor capabilities. Queuemanager information is now published to a wide range of system topics. This makes it possible to feed these data into tooling. The speaker showed a very nice example that is shared on GitHub.

Guaranteed that I will have a closer look at this option in the near future.

MQ appliance

The next messaging related session topic covered the perfect combination of 2 technologies I’m well acknowledged with: MQ and DataPower.

Someone at IBM must have thought one day: why don’t we install MQ on those powerful DataPower appliances? Great combination. Some advantages of the MQ appliance are:

· Reduce the TCO

· Easy installation/maintenance

· · Upgrades come — just like on Datapower — in .scrypt files

· 2 appliances can be easily configured as a high-availability setup

· The WebUI has monitor capabilities

In the near future (not official, forward looking statement, …)

MQ deployed in the cloud

3rd session covered MQ in the cloud. As the world becomes cloudier, IBM provides a wide range of different offerings for using MQ in the cloud like SoftLayer, Azure, Docker container in Bluemix and many more.

MQ Light

4th session was about MQ Light, actually a lab. MQ Light is is a very simple messaging API leveraging AMQP v1. It can easily connect to a distributed queue manger (as from v8) and to the Message hub in Bluemix.

I followed a small lab using a front-end app written in node.js and some backend app in node.js as well. This setup could easily scale out by using a “shared destination”. This allows a group of applications to share the processing of messages arriving on that destination. Using the MQ light UI one could see the sharing of the messages and proving how easily one can scale out. It was a very nice exercise to show some basic principles with MQ Light.

Another learning point: Node.js is fine for the I/O bound front-end. CPU intensive work is better written in another language, e.g. Java or JRuby. With messaging using MQ Light in between both.

Message hub

IBM Message Hub is based on Apache Kafka. Message hub on Bluemix has 3 API’s:

· REST

· Apache Kafka

· MQ Light

Since I didn’t really know Apache Kafka, I decided to follow an extra presentation about Kafka. The presenter told to forget all the MQ terms, otherwise it would be confusing. So, in a nutshell. Kafka uses a producer and a consumer. The producer writes his message on a topic and the consumer decides on what topic he reads. A topic can have multiple partitions to scale. Partitions are replicated and distributed between different Kafka nodes.

From my perspective, this a very interesting topic which I would like to further investigate.

Conclusion

To summarize: a lot of interesting things in the IBM messaging world to keep me busy for months.