MuleSoft ESB advantages you need to know about

The quality of the bus from MuleSoft is proven not only by the number of companies that have chosen to use the solution (Unilever, Siemens, BP, among others), but also by the fact that Gartner has named MuleSoft a leader 6 times in a row in its reports (Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management). A Gartner report looks into the strengths and weaknesses of different solutions offered by different companies. It eventually offers a qualitative analysis of specific technological categories and the potential for the development of the solutions considered. MuleSoft has been featured among the recent leaders for good reason.

Mule ESB-based development

Mule ESB makes it possible to use the DataWeave language (reminiscent of Kotlin) to transform data inside the bus without having to reach for dedicated modules or create new ones. Building more components and extending features takes place through the Mule SDK (Software Development Kit). This enables us to create reusable modules or modules tailored to a specific business profile — as well equivalents of such modules, available only in the paid Enterprise version. It’s also possible to create a separate application or microservice with Mule ESB. The bus comes with an out-of-the-box ready-made application framework and interfaces, which lets us focus on programming the business logic inside the system. Its Java Spring-based framework is yet another big advantage. It’s a popular technology, which makes it easier to find a specialist with the right experience, achieve a lower threshold for entry into Mule ESB technology, and benefit from easy maintenance.

Maintenance

One of the greatest advantages of maintaining a system using an ESB service bus is most definitely the lightness and modularity of the solution. It’s enough to add only those modules to an application running on Mule ESB that are actually necessary and used in it. This works in favor of splitting the deployment of modules into selected Mule ESB instances as needed. The possibility to use open source software is also important here. The Kernel version of Mule ESB has a free CPAL license, and the Java Spring Framework, which is the ‘foundation’ of Mule ESB, allows the use of many third-party open source libraries, which translates into no licensing costs. Another advantage is that Mule ESB integrates well with open source tools for detecting malfunctions — and generates notifications when they occur. The environment has built-in tools for detecting and diagnosing issues. This makes it a great communication broker, facilitating connecting the effects with the causes. This significantly shortens the time spent on incident handling.

An important aspect of the Mule ESB bus is its high quality and standards. Websites can transfer the responsibility for controlling access to the bus outside. They can be hidden behind an ESB layer that features authentication and authorization mechanisms such as OAuth, LDAP or WS-Security. Access control becomes then consistent for all sites and can be managed from a single location. The horizontal scalability of this solution is also a big plus. Mule ESB can be scaled independently of its ancillary components (e.g. transaction database). This makes it possible to customize performance not only by scaling the power of one instance, but also by adding more instances as necessary. The standard this solution offers is manifested in its high availability. The ability to launch multiple instances running in parallel reduces the risk of the entire bus becoming unavailable. It also allows blue-green updates, which means that deployment will not cause any downtime.

The above article covers the many advantages of Mule ESB. The most important benefits we gain from going for this technology are: