As discussed, IBM MQ has been repeatedly proven in the most extreme scenarios. And the new uniform cluster capability has simplified the administration activities that are required for many use cases. Uniform clusters are deliberately designed to work within a container environment. With customizations (as mentioned earlier) around the distribution of traffic across replicas, uniform clusters can work naturally within containers. 

## 9.4 Automation of IBM MQ provisioning using a DevOps pipeline 

Customers are adopting a decentralized IBM MQ architecture, which can lead to an increased number of IBM MQ instances. Often container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes are used to streamline the monitoring and management. Automating the deployment and maintenance of IBM MQ is central to providing the agility required for a modern IBM MQ estate. Therefore, a pipeline is critical within an organization. 

## 9.4.1 Design for DevOps pipeline 

The DevOps technology that is used might differ depending on the customer, but the high-level approach remains the same. The scenario is that within an organization there are many application development teams. Each of these want an individual IBM MQ instance to be deployed and any updates to either the configuration of IBM MQ or software level should cause a build to occur. 

Typically, the DevOps process is separated into four pipelines: 

1. IBM MQ Base Pipeline : this pipeline generates the core base IBM MQ container image that is used for the downstream pipelines. In certain instances, this can be omitted as IBM MQ Advanced and Cloud Pak for Integration provides a certified container that can be used as is. Other clients might want to define their own container image and can use our publicly available GitHub repository as a starting point for their own container image. This is depicted in Figure 9-26 on page 593. 

