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## 9.1 Modernizing your messaging topology with containers 

IBM MQ first provided support for containers in 2015, and rapidly embraced container orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes and OpenShift to allow managed production grade deployments. IBM MQ has continuously innovated over the years such that today it is just as at home in traditional deployments as it is in cloud native environments. Runtimes start-up in seconds and are arguably the most performant on the market. Container orchestration provides high availability as standard. When this is combined with cloud native features recently added to IBM MQ such as uniform clusters , scaling is simple and natural within a container environment. 

However, as we made clear in Chapter 4, “ Cloud-native concepts and technology” on page 85, there is much more to moving to containers than simply a change in infrastructure. For each technical area there are different subtleties to be considered as we move towards containerization. In this section we explore the typical stages that customers go through as they progressively modernize their IBM MQ environment. 

<img src='content_image/971754.jpg'>

As summarized in Figure 9-1 this section describes how an IBM MQ estate can be modernized by using containers across three discrete stages. 

GLYPH<SM590000> Remove local connections : Ensuring that IBM MQ is running separately of the applications it serves such that its availability and scaling is independent. 

GLYPH<SM590000> Containerized queue managers : Move the queue managers into containers to gain greater standardization, and consistency on an operational level, especially if applications are also moving to containers. 

GLYPH<SM590000> Fine grained queue managers : Reducing the dependencies between sets of queues by separating them into discrete queue managers and potentially allowing application teams greater ownership. 

