IBM | A Crunchy Case Study

Hybrid cloud, API management with containerized Postgres

IBM is a multinational technology company distinguished as being first and foremost an Enterprise company, serving the world's leaders in their industries, operating in more than 175 countries. IBM creates value for clients by providing integrated solutions and products that leverage data, IT, and deep expertise in industries that enables clients to transform their business and help them build new experiences to engage with their customers in new ways.

API management: scalable, hybrid, and multi-cloud use cases anywhere

The IBM Cloud & Cognitive Software segment includes hybrid cloud capabilities focused on integration including: API management, app integration, enterprise messaging, event streaming, high speed data transfer and end-to-end integration security. IBM API Connect is a market-leading and award-winning API management solution that allows enterprises to take control of their APIs and drive digital business with a robust API strategy. API Connect provides capabilities to create, secure, manage and socialize APIs deployed across any cloud, as well as on premises. These market-leading capabilities are available as both a standalone software product and included in a modern, hybrid integration platform with IBM Cloud Pak for Integration built on Red Hat OpenShift.

To enable ultimate scale and flexibility for hybrid use cases, API Connect takes advantage of cloud-native and microservice-based architecture, fully containerized and leveraging Kubernetes for container orchestration. In order to deliver as a cloud-native and containerized solution, IBM needed a Postgres database partner for handling persistent product configuration data that met enterprise-grade requirements for their clients. To that end, IBM selected Crunchy Data's Postgres for Kubernetes platform.

Since high availability and resiliency were key decision criteria, Crunchy Data's Postgres Operator for Kubernetes certification as a Level 5 “Auto Pilot” Operator was very valuable. This included options for a 2 Site HA topology (across multiple K8s clusters with logical replication) for resiliency and HA connection pooling for a highly performant product user experience.

The partnership not only provides technology, it also includes 24x7x365 support with access to Postgres experts within Crunchy Data - many of whom directly contribute to the open source project.