IBM MQ on AWS Cloud Messaging Fundamentals

Today’s developers are bombarded with technology choices when it comes to enterprise messaging. Getting started with a messaging technology is often easy, but discovering that you need to move to a different technology later on can be complex and disruptive. Ensuring you are using the right messaging technology – like IBM MQ – early on can save you time, effort, and costs, while also extending your project’s scalability.

You certainly have options in selecting a cloud service provider. But if you want the ease of migration and management, the flexibility of scaling and pricing, and the benefits of a leading platform with the most extensive global cloud infrastructure, you will want to consider AWS.

For running IBM MQ in the cloud, AWS provides adaptable compute, network, and storage services that are secure and reliable, while IBM MQ provides all the smarts and sophistication around what it means to be resilient.

IBM MQ provides a core set of capabilities that are essential to cloud solutions. By using IBM MQ on AWS, you build in flexibility and ease of integration with existing enterprise infrastructure. IBM MQ offers multiple language bindings, supports a wealth of protocols and APIs, with horizontal and vertical scaling options ready to support you as you grow.

In this article, we will explore how IBM MQ and AWS work conjointly to provide these messaging features:

• Assured message delivery
• Protected messages
• Sharing data across clouds
• Event-driven messaging
• Uniform clustering

Assured message delivery

Assured message delivery is just as relevant on AWS as any other platform. IBM MQ provides message assurance through robust design with transaction logging capability. It sits in the middle of your applications and acts as a standard communication fabric with high scalability and availability.

IBM MQ provides you with the robustness, security, and performance that allows you to scale up, scale vertically, or scale horizontally. It also withstands failures and ensures that the data gets through every time. Whether that is within single components, availability zones, or regions, IBM MQ will provide that sophistication to survive across it.

IBM MQ NativeHA is a native high-availability solution for IBM MQ that is suitable for use with cloud block storage like what AWS provides. A native HA configuration provides a highly available queue manager where the recoverable MQ data (for example, the messages) are replicated across multiple sets of storage, preventing loss from storage failures. With IBM MQ NativeHA, you do not need any external dependencies or special hardware requirements.

In this video, we introduce IBM MQ Native HA and showcase how it ensures delivery of messages between services, avoiding a single point of failure and limiting the impact of service dependencies and interruptions.

Protected messages

AWS deployments support all of the capabilities of IBM MQ to ensure the same level of integrity as any other deployment. IBM MQ provides industry-standard security options that offer secure and reliable connections over the network.

The main security options include TLS 1.3, encryption, authentication, and authorization. Furthermore, IBM MQ provides an additional layer of granularity for controlling what users are connecting to your queue managers.

With the IBM MQ’s AMS (Advanced Message Security), you can save your critical message data from prying eyes and malicious message injection to the data stream. With the integrity checking features, you can make sure that you are getting messages from integrous recipients, using digital signatures of the message data in order to validate the message sender.

Share data across clouds and on-prem

IBM MQ fully supports AWS deployments. In fact, IBM MQ has the most extensive range of platform support. It supports applications written in many different languages and frameworks. You can use IBM MQ on several environments, such as on-prem, cloud, and hybrid cloud deployments. Also, IBM MQ is compatible with a broad range of computing systems.

IBM MQ offers a global messaging backbone with a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Your applications can live on different environments and cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and more, and your queue managers will do all the work needed to get them to communicate with each other.

Event-driven architectures

Many modern AWS deployments leverage an event-driven architecture. IBM MQ makes it feasible to create a resilient microservice-based architecture that is entirely decoupled, enhancing the development lifecycle's agility and flexibility. You can use one technology for messaging and events, making it easier to connect decoupled microservices components together.

Event-driven architectures leverage a messaging backbone, like Apache Kafka, to deliver messages from producers to consumers. With IBM MQ, your applications can communicate with other applications with a traditional publish-subscribe message broker, allowing your applications to send out messages without having to worry about the message consumer.

Scalability via uniform clustering

AWS is a highly scalable platform. As your client applications scale up, IBM MQ can scale to meet the demands. You can swiftly scale the number of instances of your client applications up and down, without having to reconfigure their connection details and without needing to manually distribute or load balance them. Additionally, you can scale your infrastructure just by modifying your connected queue managers, without having to modify your application’s codes or configurations.

IBM MQ’s clustering technology allows your applications to scale at ease and enables your queue managers to exchange messages with each other without defining extra channel definitions or remote-queue definitions. This clustering provides you with increased availability of your queues and applications, faster throughput of messages, and more even distribution of workload in your network.

In this video, we introduce IBM MQ Uniform Clustering, which ensures that your application connections are distributed across the network of queue manager resources in a cluster configuration. The queue managers continue to evaluate the connection pattern and actively move connections to maximize message processing. As a developer, you don’t need to do add any new code to take advantage of this feature even in the event of planned and unplanned outages.

Summary

IBM MQ is a powerful and scalable enterprise messaging solution that is optimized for deployment on AWS and is designed to keep you focused on delivering business value. In the next tutorial, we will get hands-on with an IBM MQ deployment on AWS.

Want to be a part of the largest MQ community?

IBM MQ has always been about being everywhere, and this also applies to support. You can get your questions answered by other experienced MQ users and IBM subject matter experts on numerous platforms such as StackOverflow, IBM Integration Community, our IBM MQ Dev Patterns GitHub repository, or the IBM Developer youtube channel.