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The ACE tutorial

Audience: Architects, Application developers, Administrators

Overview

In this topic we're going to:

  • Introduce you to the ACE tutorial.
  • Outline the structure of the tutorial.

By the end of this topic you will understand the ACE tutorial, and how they can help you design and build cloud native ACE systems.


Introduction

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration includes a market-leading application integration capability called AppConnect Enterprise (ACE). It enables the implementation of API and event-driven integrations and provides extensive adaptation to on-premises and cloud-based applications. It provides tooling that is optimized to the users' skillsets, so that they can be productive in a matter of hours and achieve real results in days. Powerful underlying capabilities facilitate the implementation of even the most complex integration patterns. As a result, data can be moved quickly, accurately and robustly.

The purpose of this guide is to teach you how to deploy an ACE application on OpenShift Container Platform. We will be using Cloud Pak for Integration (CP4I) and other cloud native technologies such as containers, operators, microservices, immutable infrastructure and declarative APIs provided by CP4I to create a best-practice based production ready deploy of an ACE message flow. You will also be exposed to and learn how technologies such as OpenShift Pipelines (Tekton) and OpenShift Gitops (ArgoCD) integrate in a production environment.


Tutorial structure

This tutorial is divided into chapters that help you build, step-by-step, an ACE integration server based on a cloud native approach. Each chapter comprises topics which you should complete in order to gain a full understanding. The tutorial uses an example integration flow that will communicate with backend service and retrieve some data from it to send back a response to the user.

The tutorial is structured to match the development and operations lifecycle:

  • Install and upgrade.
  • Build and test.
  • Deployment.
  • Promotion.

See how the table of contents on the left of this tutorial is arranged to match this lifecycle.