IBM MQ continues to be an excellent choice for robust, scalable, enterprise grade messaging. With MQ V9.2, it is easier to deploy MQ in more ways than ever before.
Many of the world’s most successful companies rely on IBM MQ. When implementing messaging technologies, there are three key challenges that many companies face—getting started, reliability at scale, and running securely.
Let’s talk about each of these in turn.
Getting started
IBM continues to expand the ways for developers and administrators to get up and running with MQ quickly. With MQ V9.2, the REST messaging and administration APIs have been expanded, giving new users another way to get going with tooling they are already familiar with. .NET Core client support gives developers another choice of starting point from which to build the applications that drive your business.
All of this is supported by a completely overhauled user interface and tutorials, as well as best-practice sample code on MQ’s dedicated MQ developer hub. We also make a wealth of resources available for your admins on IBM Community. Your administrators and developers can spend time less time reading specs and more time solving the business challenges that matter!
Reliability at scale
With the growth in cloud, it is more important than ever to be able to perform well over significant distances and to run at scale.
With the ability to send messages with FASP technology in MQ V9.2, you can see significant performance improvements over long distances and high latency links. Now that we’ve got you up and running, running highly available, and running over large distances, what about if we could automatically balance your application workload dynamically, even with applications being added and removed? With the Uniform Clusters capability, MQ does exactly that. MQ is now able to automatically balance application workloads across available queue managers and keep doing that as applications and queue managers are added and removed.
This wouldn’t be a blog about technology without talk of containers. MQ has been running in containers for years. With MQ V9.2, it is even easier than before to deploy MQ in a containerised environment, even in highly available patterns.
Running securely
You might be doing business all over the world or just in your local area, but security always matters, and it is a growing priority. MQ helps by providing end-to-end encryption, both using TLS and by encrypting message-level data.
With V9.2, MQ continues to expand this security focus with support for Hardware Security Modules (HSM) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3, as well as allowing for Dynamic TLS CipherSpec negotiation from a pre-determined acceptable list. There are also improved integration options on z/OS between encrypted queues and those that are not, meaning that partnering with other companies just became easier.
IBM MQ can be deployed in containers, on mainframe, on bare metal servers, as a service, as an appliance, and as part of IBM Cloud Pak for Integration. Let us help you choose the right solution for you!