What is MuleSoft and Anypoint Platform Capabilities and Strengths

Introduction

MuleSoft is an software organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and it provides one of the widely used platform to connect the applications, data and devices across cloud or on premises. 

Gartner has recognized the company as a Leader for the sixth time in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). 

In addition, MuleSoft has been named a Leader for the fifth consecutive time in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management.

• In 2006, MuleSoft founded as a MuleSource by Ross Mason and Dave Rosenberg. 
• In 2009, MuleSource has been renamed to MuleSoft. MuleSoft originally provided Messaging and Middleware capabilities, later expanded to IPaaS through product Anypoint Platform.
• In 2016, MuleSoft was ranked #20 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list.
• In 2017, MuleSoft filed the IPO and start trading in New York Stock Exchange.
• In 2018, MuleSoft acquired by Salesforce.

Anypoint Platform as Integration Platform as a Service

Anypoint Platform is introduced in 2009 to expand the MuleSoft capabilities as Multitenant Integration Platform as a Service.

Multitenancy is the word often used in the cloud computing world. In the cloud computing, there are multiple tenants or customers of the cloud vendor shares the same computing resources like underlying hardware. Even tenants share the resources but they are not aware of each other and data is also isolated and secured from each other. 

Generally, one server with high configuration may be not efficient for one tenant and that tenant may not utilized the all the computing resources allocated to the server. It is always good to share that machine among the multiple tenant that can maximize the use of the resources and reduce the cost for the tenants as server is shared among multiple tenants.

In SaaS offerings, single computer software or web applications can be served by multiple unique users or users groups.

MuleSoft Cloudhub is the designed to provide enterprise multitenant, secure, elastic and high available Integration Platform as a Service. In the MuleSoft, management console and platform services "shared everything" architecture. Anypoint Platform user interface, load balancers, monitoring services are shared among the multiple tenants. These services will not process or transmit your data.

MuleSoft worker cloud is multitenant cloud of virtual machines. These VMs are the secured and provides required isolation to run your integration application without affecting others.

CloudHub offers worker clouds in the 12 region (4 North America, 3  EU, 3 Asia Pacific, 1 Central and  1 South America) and global distribution allows you deploy the applications near to you or your datacenter and this will reduce the latency.

Each region has different sub domain and domain provided to you depending on the region where you deploy the application and the name of the application.

For example, if your application name is invoice-app and deployed in US East (North Virginia) region, domain name will be invoice-app.us-e1.cloudhub.io.

Integration Application on the CloudHub worker can be deployed easily with single click in the region that distributed across the world. CloudHub offers the platform-as-a-service to develop, test and run the complex integration in the cloud.

Applications deployed in the CloudHub choose the IP address from AWS IP ranges assigned for the region. Here is full list of IP ranges for each AWS region https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json 

CloudHub is offering various other features like Zero Downtime Updates, Intelligent Healing, High Availability, Auto Scaling, Scalability.

Worker and Worker Size

Workers are dedicated instances of Mule runtime engine that run your integration applications on CloudHub. Worker sizes have different compute, memory, and storage capacities. 

Intelligent Healing

CloudHub continuously monitors the worker clouds and provides a self healing mechanism to recover the worker cloud from any issues or problems. In case of any underlying hardware failure or Availability zone goes down, the application will automatically restart in another Availability zone in the same region or recover by self.

Zero Downtime Updates

In case, if you are modifying or redeploying the application so end users of your HTTP APIs experience zero downtime. While you are redeploying the application, old version of application is keep running and domain is pointed to the old version of application till redeployment or changes are in the place for new uploaded application version.

Auto Scaling

CloudHub allows you to defined the policies for Auto Scaling so application can be Scale up or Scale down automatically depending on the memory and CPU usage. 

Scalability

Application deployed to the CloudHub can be easily scalable by increasing the number of Worker or Worker Size. Horizontal Scaling can be easily done by increasing the number of worker instances and Vertical Scaling can be easily done by increasing computing resources like worker size (vCores).

High Availability

Application deployed to the CloudHub can be easily made High Available just by deploying the application on the multiple cloud worker instances.

Anypoint Platform Components

Design Center

Design Center provides tools to design the APIs, developer Connectors and MuleSoft Applications. RAML and OAS is used to design the APIs.

Anypoint Exchange

Anypoint Exchange is repository hub where you can store your reusable assets and search for connectors, public or private assets.

• Repository hub for public templates, connectors, documents etc.
• Store the assets like templates, common frameworks, documentation to be access by your organizations.

Runtime Manager

Runtime Manager is the place where you can deploy and manage the MuleSoft Application. It also provide capabilities to setup Anypoint Virtual Private Cloud, Virtual Private Network and Dedicated Load Balancer.

• Manage application deployment lifecycle.
• Enable the alerts like CPU Usage, Memory Usage, Worker Not Responding etc.
• Create and Manage Anypoint VPC, VPN and DLB.
• View the application metrics like CPU Usage, Memory Usage etc.
• Enable Static IP Address for the applications.

API Manager

 API Manager is the component of the Anypoint Platform for managing the lifecycle of API and secure the APIs using policies. This component basically governed the APIs. 

• Securing the APIs by applying policies like IP Whitelisting, Blacklisting, JWT Validation Policy, Client Id Enforcement Policy etc.
• Discover and manage the API lifecycle.
• Enable the Alerts for policies violations, response time etc.
• View API Analytics.
• Manager API Contracts and SLA's.
• Apply API Policies like logging policy, header add and removal policies or any security policies.
• Proxy existing SOAP services or create new APIs from OAS and RAML definitions.
• Unlock applications, data, and microservices with an API gateway.

Access Management

This component is basically used to manager users, subscriptions, roles, organization, environments, Identity Management etc.

• User Management.
• Roles creation and mapping to users.
• User Identity Management using SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect.
• Client Management using OpenID Connect Dynamic Client Registration.
• Business Group Management.
• Subscriptions Management.
• Enabling Multi-factor authentication.

Anypoint DataGraph

 Anypoint DataGraph is component of Anypoint Platform which allows you to unify the multiple APIs into single data service.

With Anypoint DataGraph, you can reuse multiple APIs in a single request. Enterprise architects can easily unify APIs into one data service — all without writing more code. Developers can consume multiple APIs from the data service in a single GraphQL request. 

MuleSoft Strength and Features

• Gartner has recognized the company as a Leader for the sixth time in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). 
• MuleSoft has been named a Leader for the fifth consecutive time in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management.
• MuleSoft provides more than 200+ connectors to connect any system (like SAP, NetSuite, Salesforce, databases etc.) anywhere. It also provides XML SDK and Java SDK to write custom connectors.
• API Manager provides many out of box policies like Rate Limiting, Spike Control, Security policies etc. and even you can write custom policies.
• B2B Management and Partner Management.
• Full support of Maven lifecycle.
• Provides many core components to implement Enterprise Integration Patterns.
• MuleSoft provides multiple deployment options like CloudHub, Customer Hosted (On Premise), Hybrid and Runtime Fabric Manager (Kubernetes based).
• MuleSoft provides Anypoint Monitoring for monitoring the APIs and retrieving the real time metrics and insights.
• MuleSoft application can be deployed in 12 different AWS region. 
• Robust enterprise security enforcement capabilities. 
• Built-in high availability & clustering.
• Provides multiple options for data security and various encryption and decryption mechanism supported like JCE, PGP, XML etc.
• Support for One Way SSL and Two Way SSL authentication.
• With MuleSoft, you can design and develop APIs with no code or low code. APIs can be developed at lightning speed.
• MuleSoft supports many architectural styles like Microservicess, Domain Driven Design, API Led connectivity.

Now, you know what are different features and capabilities provided by Anypoint Platform.