Product Evaluation - MuleSoft Anypoint Platform one day workshop

People, Business Executives, Enterprise Architects, Solution/System/Application Architects, Tech Leads, Developers,  who are looking for and want to know more about MuleSoft Integration offering which is compared to other key providers like Software AG WebMethods, Oracle SOA Suite, WSO2, Informatica, etc.

Recently I attended a one day Workshop on MuleSoft Anypoint platform . The overall goal of this workshop was to evaluate MuleSoft integration technology offering for a mid-size integration environment which is currently supported through Software AG WebMethods and Oracle SOA Suite. So, if you are in process of evaluating MuleSoft Anypoint Platform for your integration needs, this write up will give you a good high level executive summary overview.

MuleSoft Product Offering falls under following category of market offering:

1. iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service)
2. Hybrid Integration
3. On-Premise Integration Platform
4. Internet of Things (#IOT) Integration

MuleSoft Anypoint Platform Product offering consist of three core components:

1. APIs - for connecting any type of API
2. SOA - for connecting traditional SOA environment
3. SaaS - for Connecting SaaS based applications

At very high level, we moved from point-to-point connection to SOA based connection few years back. Then we realized that not all integration could be converted to SOA standards. Meaning of Service was redefined. REST started picking up as de facto standard for APIs because of its lightweight nature and easy to use. Also, JSON is the payload format for delivering to Mobile client. SaaS with REST API is more effective and efficient. There is a movement of Cloud Offering and Cloud Solutions. Internet-Of-Things are on the horizon and we need to get ready for that. And there are tons of other reasons and details which are beyond the scope of my write up.

Why customers choose MuleSoft Platform?

• Faster to go-live
• Faster to change. That means increasing Agility in IT Solutions delivery organization. Agile and Adaptable
• Lightweight : Read the MuleSoft platform's systems requirement. you will know why?
• 120+ connectors
• Eliminates point-to-point
• Future Proof
• Cloud and On-Premise
• Easy to create extension
• Internet-Of-Things(#IOT)

Last but not the least, price. It was not discussed but I guess it would be less than any big commercial IT vendor.

At very high level MuleSoft Anypoint platform capabilities & feature discussion points

• Continuous Integration
• Speed to develop and to production
• Agility - Quick change
• Lightweight to be deployed even on small devices
• Future Proof
• Cloud is not the buzzword any more. How well does this work into cloud.
• In future, if we want to move to 100% SaaS will it happen
• How well MuleSoft will grow
• Basic integration need is taken care of through any vendor, so our focus would be on other key differentiator

Who all are using MuleSoft:

Zynga, Salesforce, GE, APPTUS, HP, ebay, box, Adobe, T-Mobile, Morrisons, Toyota, H&R Block, Hershey's, Intuit, nestle, pfizer, Express Scripts etc.

Workshop Lab:

Real-life business scenario: Employee On-boarding.

From technical viewpoint following are the high level areas covered in the workshop:

1. Legacy Modernization
2. Service Orchestration
3. SaaS Connectivity
4. On-Premise Deployment 
5. Cloud Deployment
6. API first design

MuleSoft targets top-down approach that means, first contract is created then API is written. That means a RAML / WSDL is created and then the API. RAML is the new concept of contract development and idea is to keep it simple compared to WSDL.

Build Pipeline
MuleSoft does support full capability of Continuous Integration through built in capability and external plug-in. Any external tool like Perforce, Jenkin, Maven tool could be plugged into Anypoint Studio to provide Continuous Integration capability. Export directly from MuleHub or IDE into source control, jenkin or any other tool and keep the Continuous Integration practice intact.

CloudHub

CloudHub is the iPaaS version of the overall MuleSoft Product suite which takes care  of all of the deployment complexities of the middleware. Pricing is based on Workers, which are similar to amazon's EC2 instances. 40% customers are using On-Premise & 40% using CloudHub only and 20% are on Hybrid platform. Product Roadmap suggest that, if organization's goal is to move on Cloud then it is suggested that we stick to CloudHub solution. During our evaluation process we have not yet evaluated the benefit of Infrastructure headaches. More about CloudHub Architecture could be find her at MuleSoft CloudHub Architecture.

Performance

White paper on performance test is available on MuleSoft Performance Metrics.

Other Capabilities & Features 

These are other key feature of MuleSoft, which were discussed in details and evaluated.

• Service Endpoint, Configuration Management
• Application Management
• Password-Security Management
• Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment
• JMS - Pub/Sub
• Monitoring
• Error Handling
• Global Elements
• Mule Management Console details
• Creating a Connector

Concerns:

• All the resources are maintained in properties file instead of some external source. Is this architecture intentional? Why?

What it doesn't support:

• Console based development is not yet supported. Do we really need it? Console based development is needed for small projects only.
• It was found that not all internal complexities of integration orchestration are supported. I would think this to be an architectural design issue rather than platform limitation.
• Top-down approach of development through WSDL is not supported.
• Off course there would be a bigger list of these items, but, it entirely depends on the scope of the integration.

Recommendations:

Gartner Magic Quadrant for iPaaS which was released in Jan 2014 puts MuleSoft as a Leader in iPaaS. It would be import to know and understand what is iPaaS.

Market Definition/Description of iPass

"An integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is a form of platform as a service (PaaS) that provides capabilities to enable subscribers (usually referred to as "tenants") to implement integration projects involving any combination of cloud-resident and on-premises endpoints — data sources, applications, services (in the service-oriented architecture [SOA] sense of the word), APIs and processes. This is achieved by leveraging the iPaaS capabilities to develop, deploy, execute, manage and monitor integration flows (at times also referred to as "integration interfaces") linking multiple endpoints (see "What IT Leaders Need to Know About Integration PaaS for Cloud Services Integration (and More)")." - Gartner

Forrester puts MuleSoft at second place in "Hybrid Integration: Internet-Of-Things Integration, Q1 ’14"

Concluding Remark:

The above texts should give you a high level idea on what MuleSoft offering is. For more detailed analysis and to be more relevant to your need and requirement I would suggest following analysis.

1. Technical Capability Analysis
2. People & Process Impact
3. Financial Analysis / Impact
4. Technology Maturity