MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is a robust solution for integrating APIs, SOAP services, event-driven RPA, and more. Ensuring quality and reliability across the entire API lifecycle is essential for the successful delivery of integration solutions. In this post, we will explore tools and techniques to enhance the quality and reliability of your MuleSoft applications.
Faulty and unreliable applications can lead to costly maintenance and repairs, negatively impact trust in the applications, and results can be disastrous. From a more organisational and technical perspective, an unreliable and or low-quality solution can overwhelm support teams and even lead a whole company to a halt if mission critical solutions leverage poor and unreliable integrations.
To ensure reliability and quality, an appropriate process of managing and overseeing APIs from creation to retirement is key. That process called API lifecycle is broken down into phases, going from solution design, development and testing all the way through to deployment and maintenance, and encompass aspects such as networking, security, exception handling, logging, and monitoring, dependencies management, consistency on data formats, and documentation.
This post aims at diving down into some of the tools and techniques that architects and developers can leverage throughout the API lifecycle to ensure reliability and quality in MuleSoft Anypoint Platform.
Design
There are a few concerns and aspects to solution design that must be considered to assure quality and reliability of APIs, which of relevance to this post are security, APIs design & specification, and documentation. A secure platform, where integrations can be created, documented, validated, and shared, fostering collaboration and better alignment can significantly improve the quality and reliability of APIs and user experiences.
Platform Security
Anypoint Platform provides security features at different levels in both Anypoint Platform and Mule Runtime Engine (Mule).
At management plane level, the security of application networks is managed and enforced by managing access for users, groups, environments, client providers, identity providers, connected apps, and external access via Access Management user interface as well as programmatically utilising both the Access Management API and Anypoint CLI (command-line interface).
API Design, Specifications & Discoverability
Solution designers leverage Anypoint Platform API Designer to create, document, and validate API specifications and fragments (using RAML, OpenAPI Specification, and AsyncAPI) and enable mock services so that consumers can interact and explore a live (mocked) API, fostering collaboration and better alignment.
Integrators can also leverage Anypoint Exchange, a hub where APIs, connectors, and various other Mule and non-Mule assets can be discovered, explored, and documented. Promoting more interaction, collaboration, and engagement with third parties Anypoint API Experience Hub can be utilised to further improve the overall experience and quality and reliability of solutions.
Implementation
During development, following best practices and writing well-structured, easy to follow, and reusable code are some of the concerns to be addressed to assure quality and reliability. Examples of these would be following the recommended naming convention for flows, sub-flows, variables, and properties.
Mule Flows, DataWeave & MUnit
Following standard, well-defined implementation practices are also fundamental to design, build, and operate future-proof applications. Following MuleSoft Best Practices such as separating implementation from interface flows (e.g. APIKit generated) and externalising DataWeave code and also having adequate levels of LOG and robust error handling techniques combined with unit testing using MUnit test cases (accelerated via Anypoint Studio Test Recorder) combined with use of Generative Flows (GenAI) directly contribute to ensuring quality and reliability.
Management
To tackle this critical phase of any integration and API solutions, MuleSoft offers a range of features ranging from runtime security and deployment, governance, through to monitoring and troubleshooting.
Deployment
Using a CI/CD pipeline tool to automate deploying applications has a number of benefits. More specifically, as deployments become much less error-prone and much more repeatable, the development team can focus on developing applications to business requirements and release becomes faster, leading to rapid feedback. Whether applications are being deployed to CloudHub, on-prem or Runtime Fabric, MuleSoft has a solution in place. Applications can be nicely and easily deployed using Mule Maven Plugin. In a more programmatically way, using CloudHub REST API or Anypoint CLI allows execution of a number of operations in the MuleSoft environment, which obviously includes the deployment of applications.
Runtime & Gateway Security
Architects and developers can securely deploy and run Mule applications in runtime plane (Mule Runtime Engine running in Cloudhub 1.0 or 2.0, on-premises or Runtime Fabric) and/or front and protect any non-Mule APIs by Anypoint Flex Gateway by leveraging secure vaults, and masking and tokenising sensitive data using Anypoint Security and also secure configuration properties, utilising cryptography module, configuring TLS, configuring Mule Secure Token Service.
Protection of API resources is catered by applying and enforcing policies such as OAuth, IP whitelisting, etc via API Manager which has several readily available and out-of-the-box API policies, and if needed, Flex Gateway Policy Development Kit (PDK) can be utilised to implement and deploy any custom policies.
API Governance
Anypoint API Governance offers self-service tools and rulesets to enable architects and developers to govern APIs from design to execution. These rulesets ensure that API designs are conformant to pre-defined standards and also that API instances have the correct level of protection with the use of the appropriate policies, thus ensuring quality and reliability at all times.
Monitoring
Monitoring applications is the most vital aspect of application management and support. It caters to practical business-as-usual (BAU) activities. Anypoint Monitoring features built-in and custom dashboards for non-functional monitoring, offering a complete view of applications and servers. Exporting audit and trace logs (telemetry data) to more specialised external observability and analytics tools is also possible via Telemetry Exporter.
This includes detailed information regarding performance, failures, JVM, and infrastructure. Additionally, administrators can configure alerts for applications and servers to track trends or quickly identify abnormal behaviour based on various conditions. API functional monitoring of public and private APIs is possible by creating automated monitors that can be executed based on a schedule at regular intervals. These are quite flexible and allow execution of basic requests as well as more complex ones, including assertions. API functional monitoring can also be achieved programmatically by leveraging the power of the Blackbox Automated Testing (BAT) CLI.
Visualisation
Ensuring effective and efficient use of Anypoint Platform is an integral part of governance. MuleSoft platform administrators can make use of Anypoint Visualizer to visualise environments, applications, and dependencies from different perspectives or view modes. In the troubleshooting view, one can have a detailed view of metrics such as response times, CPU, and memory utilisation. In the policies view, administrators can check for policy compliance. In architecture view, applications can be seen through an application network’s lenses.
As presented in this article, quality, and reliability are paramount for any integration and APIs initiative, and these two span across solution design, software development, deployment, and application management. As a reliable and top-quality platform, MuleSoft features tools to ensure quality and reliability of enterprise integration solutions at all times.
Author
Eduardo Ponzoni is an experienced integration developer, architect, and manager with 19+ years of experience. Well-versed public speaker and author of dozens of articles on all things systems and data integration. Leading from the front and by example, Eduardo is a MuleSoft Ambassador, holds several certifications and loves sales and delivery. He has led multi-disciplinary teams in digital transformation programs with MuleSoft, Kafka, Azure & Boomi. At Adaptiv Australia, Eduardo is at the forefront of the integration practice, driving the business forward with a focus on strategy, roadmap vision, sales/pre-sales, and hands-on execution and delivery as a dedicated people leader and technology specialist.
