Posts

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Helping your business department untangle the IT spaghetti This is a blog I wrote for the monitoring tool that I am writing for Coliance - called "Opsis". Your Purchasing system may run using security gateways, messaging systems, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), an API Manager etc. Overlaying each individual piece of software is a layer of configuration that makes up the runtime for each specific business solution. i.e., security gateway policies, messaging systems queues, Enterprise Service Bus Flows, etc. When viewed like this, we can see that business solutions take ‘paths’ through ‘systems’. These paths are complex and vary depending on the business problem being solved. Sometimes, however, this is unattainable with your IT team kept busy monitoring whether machines are running, or if the software is generally operational. They spend much of their time examining individual artifacts on these systems such as queues and flows. Chances a

IBM and MuleSoft push towards no-code integration

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In the May 2019 release of Mule they have included a new function called flow designer templates. These caught my eye as they are very similar to IBM’s APP Connect Designer flows and show how integration is becoming more accessible to the Line-of-Business.

IBM AppConnect Enterprise (IIB) as an API Micro-Gateway

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One of IBM's best-known secrets is that they have two solutions that can act as API Management microgateways. This is a short post to highlight the various ways that you can expose APIs using IBM products and, in particular, the App Connect Enterprise (formerly IIB) Microgateway functionality.

MQ Configuration tools

Having worked in the MQ labs at IBM Hursley for many years I was always struck by how complex MQ appeared. As time has gone by little has changed my mind on this. Recently I was asked to create a solution for the customer that required repetitive creation of an MQ environment. We chose to create a tool using JSON as a configuration language. I'll describe the tool here and welcome feedback on it.

How to choose the right API Manager for you

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A lot of my customers are currently deciding which API Manager to use in their estate. With so many of them to choose from and a confusion of terminology this is not an easy task. I see RFP with long lists of criteria but I often think that the choice should be based on some other, softer, questions. I'll outline here some of how I help my customers choose which API Manager is right for them.

API Security: More than just a throttling policy

API Management promises a nirvana of exposing data using well-known and simple techniques. Vendors focus on how easy it is to create the APIs and nearly always mention security as part of the API Lifecycle. Yet, we've all seen the headlines screaming the latest security breach so, what does Security really mean when it comes to API Management? In this post I try to differentiate the basic policies that all vendors discuss from the many other attack vectors that we need to be aware of.

Kubernetes skills: Mulesoft & IBM

Kubernetes - a skills issue Although the offerings I'm about to discuss are different, they're interesting enough to explore more closely. Both IBM and MuleSoft are claiming that the reason for implementing their solutions is because they perceive a lack of skills in containers and Kubernetes.