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Building AppConnect Integration Server

Audience: Architects, Application developers, Administrators

Timing: 4 minutes

Overview

In the Cloud Native AppConnect Enterprise GitOps section of this guide, we set up and configured GitOps for our cluster. We then used GitOps to install and manage Kubernetes infrastructure and services resources.

In this chapter, we are going to use these resources to build, deploy and run an AppConnect Integration Server. This will require us to install some more components into our cluster.

There are two kinds of resources to build in order to build an AppConnect Integration Server: one or more Configurations and an IntegrationServer. Consider the following diagram:

We will examine these components in more detail throughout this section of the tutorial; here is an overview of their function, from left to right:

  • The Configuration pipeline takes AppConnect configurations files such as server configuration (serverconf), policy projects (.policyxml), loopback datasource (datasource.json), etc. from a Git repository, and converts them to Configuration resource.

    These are OpenShift Custom Resource (CR), which are looked after by AppConnect operator and ingested by IntegrationServer CR.

    The pipeline commits the Configuration resource manifests to GitOps manifest repository.

  • The Integration Server pipeline takes AppConnect application files, such as message flows (.messageflow), sub-flows (.subflow), ESQL (.esql), mapping (.map), etc. creates a BAR file, bakes in the BAR file to a custom container image, pushes the container image to OpenShift internal registry and creates a IntegrationServer CR.

    The base image of the custom image is the IBM certified AppConnect container image, and therefore credential to the IBM Entitled Registry is required. The credential is supplied to the pipeline via the secret, ibm-entitlement-key, which we deployed in the cluster in section, IBM Entitlement Key.

    The CR resource refers to the custom container image.

    The pipeline commits the IntegrationServer resource manifests to GitOps manifest repository.

  • The pipelines require secrets to connect to GitHub. They contain GitHub access token used by the pipelines to access the configurations and Integration Application Git repository.

In the subsequent topics of this chapter:

  • We will build the required Configurations by running the Configuration pipeline.

  • We will build the IntegrationServer by running the Integration Server pipeline.