Overview
Events are everywhere. From the moment we wake up to the sound of our alarm clock, to the various activities we engage in throughout the day, events drive our lives. In the world of technology, events are just as prevalent. Whether it’s an ERP system publishing notifications about order updates or users logging in and updating their profiles, events are constantly happening around us.
The real challenges are in tracking, documenting and understanding these events.
You might still be using Anypoint Platform to streamline your integrations and Solace PubSub+ as the backbone for event brokering or documenting in wiki or Confluence. But sometimes even using these great tools you can still find it hard to stay on top of your event-driven integrations. Sounds like you?
Despite all your efforts and the great tools at your disposal, it can still be difficult to keep up with market trends in our constantly evolving industry. So, what are you missing?
This blog isn’t about presenting groundbreaking new ideas or solving all your integration problems with simple tips and tricks. Instead, it’s here to remind you of what you probably already know or might have overlooked.
You have the tools to stay on top of your events, understand them, manage them, and reuse them.
As the saying goes, we often don’t see the forest for the trees. And yes, you are not alone in that. Sometimes we forget the tools we have or simply choose to ignore them. It’s often human nature to stick to a certain path, even when change is necessary. Embracing change, especially when it comes to changing habits, isn’t easy.
But if you’re ready to make the most of the tools at your disposal and take control of your event-driven integrations, keep reading.
What are event-driven integrations, and why do they matter?
In today’s fast-paced market, microservices and event-driven integrations play a crucial role in enabling businesses to react quickly to change. Everything around is an event, from the morning clock alarm to the notification when an order is placed. Real-time integrations and technology that react to various stimuli are key to staying agile and competitive.
Event-driven integrations have been around for a while now, making them an essential part of modern technology. With the rise of microservices and IOT, events have become the primary mode of communication…
In the beginning, all was nice, plunging headfirst into event-driven integration and microservices. You had a disciplined team that followed a structured process, and you made sure to document and update everything. But now, you face the same problem you read about in so many articles and blogs: do we have an event to support this business function, who is listening or publishing and assessing the potential impact of event changes?
We have been told that ‘eventing’ your integrations and moving to microservices comes with costs and pains, but we always think it’s not going to happen to us. I can tell you now, that’s a false belief. We already know the potential challenges such as documentation, tracking existing resources and reusable assets. Yet, we often fall into the trap as others before us, and others will likely follow suit: using a Wiki such as Confluence eventually becomes unmanageable as the ecosystem grows …
Regaining control of your event-driven integrations
So, what should you do? The good news is that you already have the tools, provided to you by Anypoint Platform – Anypoint Designer, Anypoint Exchange.
MuleSoft’s approach has always been to focus on data integration using APIs, rather than competing with major players in the market. So, they applied the same strategy when it comes to events, and data streaming by partnering with the major players such as Solace and Kafka. They opened Anypoint Platform to support their platforms. Being an API-focused platform, MuleSoft added support for designing asynchronous APIs, using the Async API specification. So now you can use the same tools, i.e., Anypoint Design Center, to design Async APIs the same way as designing REST/RESTFul APIs using other languages such as RAML or OpenAPI.
But being MuleSoft, they have taken this even further, leveraging the beauty and power of RAML: modularisation. So now you can reuse API Fragments written in RAML to compose your Async specifications.
For more details about writing Async API Specifications in Anypoint Designer, please have a look Event-Driven API | Anypoint API Designer.
You can now deploy them in Exchange to be discovered by your team or external partners, just as any other API specification, so everyone can now discover and use them.
As mentioned, MuleSoft’s product roadmap promises the ability to apply policies to async APIs in API manager or Flex, just as you would normally do with other REST APIs. How awesome is that? This means you can design an event-driven integration such as a pub-sub pattern and apply security policies to them like any other API. Improving API governance across your organisation.
That’s unleashing the power of the Anypoint Platform.
However, you might still be concerned about the visibility of your entire ecosystem, such as who produces an event, and who subscribes to it. and assessing the impact of changes to an event schema.
Introduce Anypoint Visualizer. A tool often forgotten, but incredibly powerful if used correctly.
Anypoint Visualizer displays views of different aspects of an application network graph. It allows you to explore your application network in a graphical, easy-to-understand way. You can tag your integrations so you can filter them and have a full view of your Async and Sync integrations altogether. Only the sky is the limit to how you organise your integrations. For more details, please see Visualizer | Customize your canvas.
Use cases for Anypoint Visualizer include architectural review, troubleshooting, and policy compliance (governance policies).
Anypoint Visualizer provides a real-time, graphical representation of the APIs, and Mule applications that are running and discoverable. It also displays third-party systems that are invoked by a Mule API, proxy, or application within your application network. The data displayed in the graph is dynamically updated and does not require prior configuration for CloudHub 2.0 and just minimal configuration for CloudhHub 1.0 such as enabling monitoring agent; see Cloudhub setup | Enable the monitoring agent for more details.
Additionally, the data displayed is secure, as only users with the proper permissions can view the application network graph.
Going back to our integrations, here’s a quick setup for the Demo ERP application, with custom tags, layer and display name:
From these properties, Display Name and Tags can be anything that makes sense to your ecosystem, while layer is typically one of the API-Led Architecture layers: Experience, Process or System.
And what it looks like in Anypoint Vizualizer, in Architectural View:
We can see in this view that our applications are event-driven, listening & publishing events via the JMS MuleSoft Connector.
And a real-time visualization of response times, using the Troubleshooting View:
And if that’s not enough still, let’s go to Solace now. As you more likely know already, MuleSoft and Solace have joined in partnership, therefore opening their platforms to each other. The promise here is that you will be able to connect Anypoint Platform and Solace PubSub+ and discover Async APIs between them: use Exchange to scan Solace brokers and vice-versa.
If you’re concerned your architects are not tech-savvy enough to write RAML fragments and Async API specifications, well, the good news is they don’t have to, with Solace PubSub+ offering a solution with its Event Portal. It’s an extra cost to your license, but well worth it as you will see in a minute.
You can use it to define events, add schemas, and define applications (producers, consumers) in a visual, drag & drop style of work. No tech knowledge is involved. And then just generate the Async API with a click of a button.
Take that Async API spec and import it into Anypoint Platform, just like as you would import any other RAML or Open API specification. That’s until the platforms will fully integrate with each other, when this manual step will not be required anymore.
And voila, you have an Async API specification you can tweak, publish, discover … repeat.
Regaining control of your event-driven integrations doesn’t have to be a daunting task. By leveraging the powerful tools provided by Anypoint Platform and Exchange, you can stay on top of your integrations, manage them effectively, and keep up with market trends. Remember to stay organised, collaborate with your team, and continuously improve your integration processes.
So, you have all the tools you need, or you’re almost there … happy eventing.
Ready to take your event-driven integrations to the next level? Sign up for a three-hour free consultation with our integration experts and learn how our solutions can help you stay on top of your event-driven integrations. Contact us.
FAQs
- What are event-driven integrations and why are they important? Event-driven integrations allow systems to react and communicate in real-time based on events, improving responsiveness and agility in business processes.
- How can organizations manage event-driven integrations effectively? By using tools like Anypoint Platform and Solace, organizations can streamline their event-driven integrations, ensuring robust management and monitoring of events.
- What tools are recommended for controlling event-driven integrations? Tools like MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform and Solace PubSub+ are ideal for managing and visualizing event-driven integrations.
- What are the challenges in event-driven integration management? Managing complexity, ensuring reliable event tracking, and maintaining documentation are common challenges in event-driven integration.
- How can companies improve their event-driven integration processes? Regularly reviewing and updating integration strategies, leveraging advanced visualization tools, and embracing modular API design can enhance event-driven integration efficiency.
