Agile Integration with Claus Ibsen

Red Hat’s Claus Ibsen explains the fundamental principles and the importance of distributed integration. As a key committer to the Apache Camel open source integration framework, Claus provides his perspective on the role of Apache Camel in the Red Hat stack.

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Transcript

Adrian Bowles: I've followed Red Hat for many years. And obviously when I think Red Hat, I think open source. I think open as a philosophy. I know that you are a key committer and very involved with Apache Camel and I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that, about your role and about Camel itself? How it fits with Red Hat in this stack?
Claus Ibsen: So if you take a look at the Agile Integration stack with the three pillars. You have distributed integrations, you have containers, and APIs. Then Camel's main area is within the first pillar; distributed integration.
AB: Okay. And what makes Camel special? Obviously it's been around for what, 10 years?
CI: Yes.
AB: So that's a success story in software.
CI: Absolutely. So, what makes Camel special is that with the premise of distributed integration that develops a need to build integration where it's needed, rather than trying to centralize it. Just sort of using like a hub and spoke as less ESB architecture. So, that is possible with Camel because, Camel is a very lightweight integration framework that has a very low footprint that allows you to run and use Camel anywhere.
AB: So, it's not resource intensive. You can put it in different places?
CI: Absolutely. So, people can use it on premise, on the cloud, using containers, and it's very lightweight.
Camel is probably the most popular integration library of framework on the market today. It's very successful but not, say, it's not dominating one industry or with the others, so it's very generic. So, you can use it in healthcare, in finance, in automotive, and space, anything. Retailers, for example. Many retailers are using it.
AB: How do you see open source communities like Apache Camel contributing to innovation?
CI: Oh, I see that is a key factor for open source communities that they are driving innovation in a much faster way than we've seen ever before. So, when Camel was created over 10 years ago, open source was not sort of like, ambiguous as it is today. It wasn't sort of like a first choice back then so there was more pushback around that one, and we were sort of like competing against big vendors with their proprietary integration products.
But, because we were a community driven and an open society, we were able to sort of attract people from the community to help in innovate and contribute their time and custom creation to the product. That's the key factor of open source communities, is that, now people can actually, with ... they have the interest of heart they can be engaged in those communities and be part of it.
Especially around the Apache software foundation. It's very important in the fact that it's a vendor neutral foundation. So, people have more trust in to Apache. It's not like a single vendor that has control of everything.
AB: Right.
CI: So, people are more willing to go to a community like Apache, or Clips, or some other ones. And help those communities. If you show the skills and you know, you do the effort to become a ... Anyone can become a ... It's not like it is a gated community let’s say.
AB: Right.
CI: And that's, let’s say, a key fact of innovation as well, because we get new minds into the game. And that's why you can say, Camel year over year has been growing and been able to compete against huge ... from big vendors, because of the open source.
AB: Sure.
CI: What is so great about Camel is that, as being an integration library there are ... Comes out of the box with 200 or so connectors for many different IT systems. Pegasus systems and new systems and cloud providers and so on. You have to...for everything. And the reason for that is, it's very easy to build your own connectors.
AB: Okay.
CI: So, that is what we think. So, if chances are that you are integrating the system. And if there's not an out of the box connector that works for that you can build your own.
AB: You build it and contribute it.
CI: Yes, that's what we're doing. And people are very willing to do that when it's the foundation that is contributing to it because it's a trusted entity and so on.
AB: So, obviously you're passionate about Camel. You've been working on it for a long time. What are your customers doing. Can you give me any examples of how customers are using Camel for integration?
CI: Yes, so, we do have customers using Camel in the world so to speak. And I'm talking about green fill products and this is brown fill.
AB: Sure.
CI: So, you can say, in more traditional integration products using the brown fill approach, we see that there is a need for that because any enterprises today have a large of different IT systems.