Anypoint by MuleSoft

One of my recent IT project allocations was as a Delivery Manager for MuleSoft and the Anypoint Platform, from October 2018 to June 2019.

MuleSoft – Anypoint Platform
(An updated summary of information and useful links – MW: 01 May 2021)

MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform is the leading enterprise platform for building APIs (Application Programming Interface), integrations and application networks. Uniquely built as a single solution, Anypoint Platform is optimized for designing, developing and managing APIs and integrations that can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud or hybrid.

Start from Anypoint Exchange

Anypoint Exchange is the central repository of resources for Anypoint platform, which includes connectors, templates, examples and APIs. Discover and reuse hundreds of assets, curate documentation and examples, manage developer access, and drive adoption and collaboration of your assets. Within Anypoint Exchange, you can also:

1) Create portals to share APIs with internal, external or select users

2) Test API specifications without implementation using a mocked service

3) Generate interactive tutorials with API Notebooks

Design APIs & integrations

Anypoint Design Center provides a comprehensive set of development tools that make it easy to design, test and implement APIs, build integrations and create connectors for any system. Within Design Center, you can:

1) Design, auto-document, mock, test and validate RAML (RESTful API Modeling Language) – and OAS-based (OpenAPI Specification) API specifications

2) Build integration flows using an easy, low-code environment by following a guided walk-through, accepting or modifying automated data mapping recommendations and deploying with one click

3) Connect systems, integrate applications and implement APIs graphically or with code in Anypoint Studio, the unified integrated development environment (IDE) for Anypoint Platform

Within Studio you can:

a) Query and transform data (e.g. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), XML (Extensible Markup Language) and COBOL (common business-oriented language) Copybook) using DataWeave, in real-time or batch, and filter, aggregate, and sort data of any volume. DataWeave is the MuleSoft expression language for accessing and transforming data that travels through a Mule app. DataWeave is tightly integrated with the Mule runtime engine, which runs the scripts and expressions in your Mule app.

b) Build integrated and unit tests automatically with MUnit the Mule application testing framework. MUnit is a Mule application testing framework that allows you to easily build automated tests for your integrations and APIs. It provides a full suite of integration and unit test capabilities, and is fully integrated with Maven (Maven is a build automation tool used primarily for Java projects) and Surefire (Maven Surefire plugin is designed to execute the unit tests of an application and can generate the reports using HTML format (stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, and is the standard markup language for creating Web pages)) for integration with your continuous deployment environment. Leverage both mocked and active data during test execution and use tests in your CI/CD pipeline with complementary support for Jenkins (an open source automation server which enables developers around the world to reliably build, test, and deploy their software), Maven, Git and more.

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

In software engineering, CI/CD or CICD generally refers to the combined practices of continuous integration and either continuous delivery or continuous deployment. CI/CD bridges the gaps between development and operation activities and teams by enforcing automation in building, testing and deployment of applications.

Run APIs and integrations on Mule

Mule powers Anypoint Platform as the singular run-time engine for APIs and integrations, deployed to the cloud, on-premises or hybrid. Use Mule for synchronous or asynchronous integration in real-time or batch execution. Mule’s distributed architecture with message replication and persistence ensures zero message loss, availability and reliability.

Synchronous means that you call a web service (or function or whatever) and wait until it returns – all other code execution and user interaction is stopped until the call returns.

Asynchronous means that you do not halt all other operations while waiting for the web service call to return. Other code executes and/or the user can continue to interact with the page (or program UI).

Mule SDK is a software development kit with a simple annotation-based programming model for extending Mule to create reusable connectors, routers and modules. Mule SDK injects cross-cutting functionality like streaming, media-type handling and re-connection into existing modules without the need to rebuild them.

Deploy and manage anywhere

Anypoint Platform can be seamlessly deployed anywhere: public or private clouds, on-premises and hybrid. MuleSoft supports all deployment models for development, deployment and management.

CloudHub is a fully MuleSoft-managed cloud solution without the need to maintain or configure hardware. It is highly available, multi-tenant solution with 99.99% up-time, and global run-time deployment options across 12 regions.

Multi-tenancy means that a single instance of the software and its supporting infrastructure serves multiple customers. Each customer shares the software application and also shares a single database. Each tenant’s data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants.

Potential benefits of multi-tenant:

• Affordable Cost: Multiple customers means that the cost for the environment is shared, and those savings (from the SaaS vendor) are typically transferred to the cost of the software.
• Integrations: Cloud environments allow for easier integration with other applications through the use of APIs.
• “Hands-free” Maintenance: The server technically belongs to the SaaS vendor, meaning that a certain level of database maintenance is handled by the vendor, instead of you maintaining the environment yourself.

Anypoint Runtime Fabric is a container service that orchestrates and automates Mule run-time deployment across Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and data centers.

Gain the benefits of a cloud solution on-premises with automated application isolation, zero-downtime re-deployments and horizontal scalability.

Centrally manage, monitor and analyse

Manage all aspects of Anypoint Platform, whether on-premises or in the cloud, with Anypoint Management Center.

1) Access Management: provision users and groups with the right access to resources and functionality within Anypoint Platform. Leverage pre-built integration with LDAP and single sign-on solutions, like PingFederate (PingFederate is an enterprise federation server that enables user authentication and single sign-on), OpenAM (OpenAM is an open-source access management, entitlements and federation server platform) and Okta (Okta, Inc. is a publicly traded identity and access management company based in San Francisco).

LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is an open and cross platform protocol used for directory services authentication. LDAP provides the communication language that applications use to communicate with other directory services servers.

2) API Manager: Manage, proxy, version control, and secure APIs. Use pre-built policies provided by MuleSoft and add or reuse custom policies.

3) Runtime Manager: Deploy and manage APIs and integrations in the cloud or on-premises. Automate deployments by using run-time APIs and plugins for existing frameworks.

4) Anypoint Analytics: Get full visibility into the business transactions and events of your integrations and analyse data across one or multiple APIs with customizable dashboards.

5) Anypoint Monitoring: Identify issues, map dependencies, monitor application health, and manage logs in one unified interface.

6) Anypoint Visualizer: Gain a real-time, holistic view of all running APIs and integrations and how they’re connected, and troubleshoot quickly with error rates, throughput, and response time segmentation.

Secure your APIs and integrations

Anypoint Platform provides security by default, compliant with industry standards such as ISO 27001 (ISO 27001 is the internationally recognised, best practice framework for an Information Security Management System (ISMS)), SSAE 18 (Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements, overseen by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), SSAE 18 governs the way organizations report on their various compliance controls), SOC 1 and 2 certification (a SOC 1 report is designed to address internal controls over financial reporting while a SOC 2 report addresses a service organization’s controls that are relevant to their operations and compliance), and PCI-DSS (the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is a set of requirements intended to ensure that all companies that process, store, or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment).

Apply security in layers as you design APIs, adding out-of-the-box or customized policies, and managing access levels per user or business group. Furthermore:

1) Apply edge protection to all API gateways to guard incoming traffic for any irregularities or breaches. Encrypt traffic with SSL/TLS handshakes and certificates and protect applications against malicious content threats and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and, in short, it’s the standard technology for keeping an internet connection secure and safeguarding any sensitive data that is being sent between two systems, preventing criminals from reading and modifying any information transferred, including potential personal details. The two systems can be a server and a client (for example, a shopping website and browser) or server to server (for example, an application with personal identifiable information or with payroll information).

It does this by making sure that any data transferred between users and sites, or between two systems remain impossible to read. It uses encryption algorithms to scramble data in transit, preventing hackers from reading it as it is sent over the connection. This information could be anything sensitive or personal which can include credit card numbers and other financial information, names and addresses.

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is just an updated, more secure, version of SSL. We still refer to our security certificates as SSL because it is a more commonly used term, but when you are buying SSL from DigiCert you are actually buying the most up to date TLS certificates with the option of ECC, RSA or DSA encryption.

HTTPS (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure) appears in the URL when a website is secured by an SSL certificate. The details of the certificate, including the issuing authority and the corporate name of the website owner, can be viewed by clicking on the lock symbol on the browser bar.

2) Mitigate risk of breaches as data moves across the enterprise. With format preserving, vaultless tokenization, protect data at rest or in-flight and meet PCI/ PHI/ PII compliance and data residency requirements like GDPR (The General Data Protection Regulation is a legal framework that sets guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information from individuals who live in the European Union (EU)).

Scale with Runtime Services

Anypoint MQ is a multi-tenant, cloud messaging service that is infinitely scalable. It supports advanced asynchronous messaging scenarios such as queuing and pub/sub. Anypoint MQ can also support in-memory messages, time-stamping and non-repudiation logic built on Mule applications.

Object Store persists data for retrieval across any cloud deployment models. Use it to store state between messages, and to share temporary data across Mule workers for watermarking variables and API caching.
MuleSoft’s mission is to help organizations change and innovate faster by making it easy to connect the world’s applications, data and devices. With it’s API-led approach to connectivity, MuleSoft’s market-leading Anypoint Platform is enabling over 1,000 organizations in approximately 60 countries to build application networks. For more information, visit www.mulesoft.com.