As you learned from searching with Google, this is an elliptic curve. Integral points on elliptic curves are conveniently treated as a special subset of the rational points on such curves.
A lot of computation has already been done to identify the integral points and much else about elliptic curves with smallish coefficients. There turn out to be surprising equivalences among these, starting with changes of variables that are birational, so that $a,b$ can be rewritten as rational expressions in $x,y$ in a way that also allows $x,y$ to be expressed as rational expressions in $a,b$.
Here, setting $a = x/3$ and $b = y/9$ leads to the following Weierstrass form of your equation:
$$ a^3 = 3b^2 - 2 $$
$$ \frac{x^3}{27} = 3 \cdot \frac{y^2}{81} - 2 $$
$$ y^2 = x^3 + 54 $$
Note that if $(a,b)$ is an integral point of your original equation, then $x = 3a, y = 9b$ is an integer solution of the rewritten Weierstrass equation. In fact that equation is a special case of the form $y^2 = x^3 + k$ for integer $k$ known as a Mordell curve. It is known that there are only finitely many integral points on such curves.
In addition to instructions for software packages to analyze this curve, the results of what is known are summarized in this page, LMFDB Elliptic curve y² = x³ + 54. There we learn the only integral points are $(3,\pm 9)$.
It follows that the only integral points on your original curve are $(1,\pm 1)$.