Create IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) Development Environment in Azure in 5 minutes — A Tutorial
By: Chary Lingachary
Tags: App Connect Enterprise, IBM, Ace, Container, Docker

For this tutorial, I’m going to use docker image for IBM App Connect Enterprise. This is available in Docker Hub in ibmcom repository at https://hub.docker.com/r/ibmcom/ace.

This docker image can be pulled using docker pull command as

Now, sign into Azure Portal and create a new “container instance” resource. Search and find Container Instances in Azure Marketplace.

(Note: you will need an azure account and an active subscription to create Azure resources.)

On create container instance page, configure as per the following:

Subscription: <your azure subscription>. This shows up automatically. Select one if you have more than one.

Resource Group: container-rg (choose create new resource group button and type container-rg

Container name: ace-container

Region: East US

Image Source: Select Docker Hub

Image Type: Public

Image: ibmcom/ace (Note: This is the App Connect docker image we saw in Docker Hub above). This must match exactly as it is in the docker pull command)

OS Type: Linux

Size: 1 vcpu, 1.6GiB memory, 0 gpus (this is the default)

On the Networking tab, select the following:

Networking type: public

DNS name label: acecontainer

Ports: create ports 7600 (Web Admin Port) and 7800 (Default HTTP port)

Move to the Advanced tab and configure two parameters

LICENSE=accept

ACE_SERVER_NAME=aceserver

and set Restart Policy to Never

Click on review + create button and Azure runs a validation test. Once validation is passed, you will be able to create the ACE container.

Before clicking on Create button, download the template for automation by clicking on download link.

Download link takes you to a new screen. Click on Download and save the file. It creates template.zip file. template.zip file has two files: template.json and parameters.json.

Close the screen by clicking on X on the top right corner. That will take you back to create container screen. Click on Create button. You will see Deployment Progress screen. Wait until the deployment is complete. This may take a minute or two depending on the size of docker image.

Once deployment is complete, you can go to the new resource created by clicking on Go to resource button.

Once you are on the resource page, you can verify status of the container, fully qualified domain name (FQDN), Public IP Address and OS Type.

Click on containers on left navigation and check logs and verify there are no errors.

Your environment is ready now.

Now you can launch ACE Admin Console at

http://acecontainer.eastus.azurecontainer.io:7600

You will notice that admin console is not secured, and nothing has been deployed yet. Now you can click on deploy button and deploy a BAR file to test the environment.

To access ACE command line console, go back to containers page and click on connect.

You are logged into the ACE server environment.

You can run few ACE commands to verify that it is working as expected.

First, source mqsiprofile from server/bin directory

mqsilist command shows no integration nodes have been defined on the machine.

Limitations of this docker image: Since this image is a developers image, it’s limited to single integration server and unsecured.

For test/production image, you must contact IBM to get the official production image.