Companies are increasingly aware of the benefits of building native cloud solutions and seek to leverage technology and associated methodologies to quickly create and deliver new digital experiences. However, in order to realize the benefits of native cloud development and deliver products faster, companies must overcome the challenges of maintaining corporate governance and the cost of giving rise to new skills, as well as transforming cutting-edge development practices the tip.
This article provides an overview of technology visualization enhancements for the Accelerators for Teams feature in IBM Cloud Pak for Applications, which offers functionality to build RESTful and event-driven solutions in the cloud. From now on, these new tools will simply be called accelerators.
Accelerators allow you to quickly deliver native cloud solutions, streamlining from idea to implementation in production. They eliminate the complexity and friction of multidisciplinary teams, allowing their developers, architects and operations to centrally encode and manage decisions. Through such an approach, your development teams are able to innovate quickly with the confidence that they comply with your company’s unique operational, security and technology standards.
Note: This article refers to actions related to disciplines, such as operations. Depending on your organization, individuals and teams may have responsibilities in various disciplines, such as through the adoption of DevOps or DevSecOps.
Accelerators for Teams provides corporate governance and increased productivity for multidisciplinary teams, bringing together Application Stacks, integrated DevOps developed on Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and a choice of developer tools. Technology visualization enhancements extend these capabilities with an approach to design and build applications that are comprised of various microservices and dependent services and deploy them through a GitOps workflow for OpenShift.
Through the visualization of technology for RESTful and event-based solutions, architects can design a Solution Blueprint composed of microservices and connected services (a database, for example). From their design, accelerators automatically generate all the necessary source code repositories in Git with scaffolded microservices that are continuously built in containers. Microservices are implemented in OpenShift through a GitOps workflow using OpenShift Pipelines (built on the Tekton open source project) and preconfigured to provide the following benefits:
Service discovery: connections are established for other microservices and for necessary services.
Integrity checks: microservices can be managed and restarted automatically as needed.
Observability: Labels are applied so that microservices are displayed as part of an application in the OpenShift topology viewer. Prometheus metrics are exposed so that performance can be monitored and viewed through Grafana panels.
All of these advantages are realized before a developer writes a single line of code. What used to take weeks of frustration (access requests, infrastructure configuration and application configuration) is now automated. To see this workflow in action, watch the following video.
