IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE) is a powerful and widely used integration tool. Developers create integration flows by defining an entry point that receives a message, then processing that message, and finishing by sending or placing the transformed message. Flows consist of a series of nodes and logical constructs. ACE is powerful and flexible — there are many nodes provided specifically to interact with the systems being integrated, however there are also nodes that can run a script or Java code. Because of this, ACE can do pretty much anything, and as such could be considered (although this is not its intended purpose) as an application runtime environment.
An ACE flow is a deployable unit that is inherently stateless, although it can manage its own state. In a traditional server environment, many flows are deployed on an integration server and their execution can be managed and scaled using the workload management features. This makes ACE a natural fit for a Kubernetes environment.