IBM MQ connects applications and systems across hybrid and multicloud environments and is chosen by thousands of businesses worldwide across every industry because of its unparalleled resilience for assured message delivery and security for mission-critical business data.
Learn more about IBM MQ and how it can drive value and differentiation for your business.
IBM continues to deliver the latest innovation through Continuous Delivery releases, providing early access to new features ahead of making them available in major releases that have Long Term Support (LTS). LTS releases are available with five years of standard support and up to four years of extended support.
In this post, we’ll look at some of the feature highlights in the v9.3.3 Continuous Delivery release and how you can use them to drive additional value from your IBM MQ solution. v9.3.3 was officially announced on May 9, 2023, and is generally available on June 20, 2023, for hybrid cloud software, IBM MQ Appliance, and in the IBM MQ SaaS Service on IBM Cloud and AWS.
IBM MQ Console: Automatic relationship mapping
The IBM MQ Console is a powerful user interface that lets you visualize and manage your MQ objects, including queue managers and queues. Inside it, you can create queue managers and queues, see your messages, set permissions and properties, and much more.
No software other than a browser is required, and the views are built with intelligence and cross-references that connect information in ways that would normally require a deeper understanding of MQ commands and related data fields. This makes the Console perfect for both new users (enabling them to rapidly get started with IBM MQ) and existing, more experienced users who are managing large estates across hybrid and/or multicloud.
In v9.3.3, new automatic relationship mapping means users can now easily understand and observe the relationships between MQ resources to rapidly identify and resolve issues. Users can select an application, for instance, and see which queues it is connecting to, which channels are in use, and which connections are active.
This feature is available across all IBM MQ form factors.
IBM MQ Apache Kafka Connectors: Unlock events in mission-critical systems
In the v9.3.3 release, IBM MQ Advanced software for hybrid cloud (distributed platforms) and IBM MQ Advanced for z/OS VUE now include fully IBM-supported IBM MQ Sink and Source connectors for Apache Kafka. This means that events from enterprise data can be captured in IBM MQ and delivered seamlessly into an Apache Kafka event-streaming platform.
Businesses can improve business performance by tapping into the value of mission-critical data to act on events in real-time. For more information about this and how you can put business events to work, read this blog post.
IBM MQ RESTful Messaging API: Simplified messaging
In addition to the Console, IBM MQ provides APIs for users to interact with different MQ objects. This flexibility is useful for businesses as development teams may have different skills or preferences in how they prefer to work with their applications and the underlying technologies. The MQ APIs are useful if you need to set things up as an architect, configure and maintain as an administrator, or use queues, topics and subscriptions in applications that connect to the MQ server as an application developer.
IBM MQ v9.3.3 provides an update to the REST Messaging API to speed the development of REST messaging applications. Users can benefit from a built-in, preconfigured messaging REST API to gain greater flexibility, availability and scale for their MQ infrastructure.
This feature is available to Hybrid Cloud (distributed) software.
IBM MQ Appliance: Hardened security
For those trying to simplify the maintenance of MQ estates and reduce costs while freeing space in their data centers, the IBM MQ Appliance is a natural choice. It is simple to set up and manage, with firmware pre-installed on dedicated, secured hardware so your teams can get started rapidly. From a performance perspective, MQ Appliance can handle even the most demanding high-volume workloads—the latest model M2003 is capable of process over a million messages per second.
Now, IBM MQ Appliance users can further reduce business risk by strengthening security with industry best practice SSH certificate authentication and achieve security consistency across a hybrid MQ estate. For more information see this post.
This feature is available to clients running IBM MQ v9.3.3 and above firmware on IBM MQ Appliances.
New ordering options
Finally, to help clients optimize costs and gain better visibility of the size of their production and non-production environments, new ordering options for non-production have been introduced for IBM MQ software for hybrid cloud. Reduce the cost of licenses in non-production environments and gain better visibility into the size and deployment of license distribution across your estate.
As noted in the announcement letter, IBM intends to release v9.3.3 for IBM MQ for z/OS, and we’ll let you know about the new IBM MQ features for z/OS that exploit the capabilities of the mainframe when it is announced.
For information about all features in v9.3.3, including OS updates and where to find the downloads, visit the IBM TechXchange Community.