Initial setup for a HIP ecosystem

Axway’s Australia dives into a description of our initial setup for our HIP ecosystem. This ecosystem is shown at a high level in the diagram below, followed by an explanation of the main points. I provide components in red through the at the Axway Platform and those in blue are components developed by ourselves. I describe components in the order of the development/deployment process.

HIP ecosystem

API Application: API-driven microservices are built with either API Builder (for services utilizing existing APIs or not requiring a lot of custom logic) or through Java Spring Boot (for new services developed from the ground up). Irrespective of the development technology, the key artifact is a dockerfile providing instructions to containerize the microservice. All code is managed through an Axway-Australia Github account. We treat these applications as being “on prem.”

Build/Tag/Push: From our local boxes, we follow the typical containerization procedure of building, tagging and pushing the container to a dockerhub repository.

Dockerhub: All docker containers are kept within our online AxwayAustralia DockerHub repository.

Service Mesh: This is our own service mesh implemented with Kubernetes and Istio along with the necessary Axway agents to help integrate with API Central (for auto-discovery of services). The service mesh is hosted in an AWS cluster and contains our custom microservices, as well as other software including a RabbitMQ server and a PostgreSQL database. Credit goes to Peter Kim for building and maintaining this environment.

READ MORE: AMPLIFY Central Mesh Governance is Here…But, What’s a Service Mesh?

Jenkins: A recent addition to our flow is a Jenkins server that allows us to quickly and easily deploy microservices to the service mesh. Using a very simple interface, Jenkins is configured to pull the containerized microservice from Dockerhub and deploy it to the service mesh–all within seconds!

READ MORE: Streamlining API and microservices workflow.

Axway Platform: An AxwayAustralia platform (i.e., as a separate Organization) has been provisioned to provide a controlled environment to work with.

API Central + Mesh Governance: These Platform components allow us to manage microservices from the service mesh. Through the use of agents within the mesh, microservices are automatically detected and made available on the Platform. Mesh Governance allows us to register these services while API Central allows us to further configure and expose these services –with the goal of publishing to the Unified Catalog.

READ MORE: Get started with AMPLIFY Central–secure an API.

Unified Catalog: Provides a view of all services that are available including microservices from the service mesh, APIs registered in API Central and flows built with Integration Builder. Generally, this view is used to generate service swagger files that can create custom connectors in Integration Builder.

Integration Builder: This is where finally combine elements (services) from the Unified Catalog with cloud connectors made available in Integration Builder through the development of meaningful flows.

Overall, this environment provides a solid end-to-end development process from the initial build of services to implementing business flows using a range of connectors. At this stage, from a Platform perspective, we are making use of the components highlighted below.

READ MORE: Accessing Axway mobile backend service from Axway’s Integration Builder.