Chapter 1. Introduction to Camel K

Red Hat Integration - Camel K is a lightweight integration framework built from Apache Camel K that runs natively in the cloud on OpenShift. Camel K is specifically designed for serverless and microservice architectures. You can use Camel K to instantly run your integration code written in Camel Domain Specific Language (DSL) directly on OpenShift. Camel K is a subproject of the Apache Camel open source community: https://github.com/apache/camel-k.

Camel K is implemented in the Go programming language and uses the Kubernetes Operator SDK to automatically deploy integrations in the cloud. For example, this includes automatically creating services and routes on OpenShift. This provides much faster turnaround times when deploying and redeploying integrations in the cloud, such as a few seconds or less instead of minutes.

The Camel K runtime provides significant performance optimizations. The Quarkus cloud-native Java framework is enabled by default to provide faster start up times, and lower memory and CPU footprints. When running Camel K in developer mode, you can make live updates to your integration DSL and view results instantly in the cloud on OpenShift, without waiting for your integration to redeploy.

Using Camel K with OpenShift Serverless and Knative Serving, containers are created only as needed and are autoscaled under load up and down to zero. This reduces cost by removing the overhead of server provisioning and maintenance and enables you to focus on application development instead.

Using Camel K with OpenShift Serverless and Knative Eventing, you can manage how components in your system communicate in an event-driven architecture for serverless applications. This provides flexibility and creates efficiencies through decoupled relationships between event producers and consumers using a publish-subscribe or event-streaming model.

The Camel K includes the following main platforms and features:

1.2.2. Camel K features

• Knative Serving for autoscaling and scale-to-zero
• Knative Eventing for event-driven architectures
• Performance optimizations using Quarkus runtime by default
• Camel integrations written in Java or YAML DSL
• Development tooling with Visual Studio Code
• Monitoring of integrations using Prometheus in OpenShift
• Quickstart tutorials
• Kamelet catalog of connectors to external systems such as AWS, Jira, and Salesforce

The following diagram shows a simplified view of the Camel K cloud-native architecture:

Additional resources

• Apache Camel architecture

The Camel K provides development tooling extensions for Visual Studio (VS) Code, Red Hat CodeReady WorkSpaces, and Eclipse Che. The Camel-based tooling extensions include features such as automatic completion of Camel DSL code, Camel K modeline configuration, and Camel K traits. While Didact tutorial tooling extensions provide automatic execution of Camel K quick start tutorial commands.

The following VS Code development tooling extensions are available:

For details on how to set up these VS Code extensions for Camel K, see Setting up your Camel K development environment.

Note: The Camel K VS Code extensions are community features.

Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces and Eclipse Che also provide these features using the vscode-camelk plug-in.