The next step of IT maturity in organizations is to integrate their siloed systems. Effective integrations are the next step for many organizations in the maturity of their system landscape. To better serve customers and internal users, organizations are attempting to integrate their fragmented system landscape.
It’s incredibly important for Salesforce professionals, as they continue to implement, improve, and maintain their Salesforce instances, to have basic integration knowledge.
This article is for Salesforce Consultants, Admins, Architects, and others who are interested in gaining a surface-level understanding of the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform. By the end of this article, you will be able to converse about the Anypoint platform and its capabilities; however, you may not feel comfortable building a complex endpoint schema using DataWeave based solely on this article.
Hopefully, by the time you finish reading, you will feel empowered to further your MuleSoft learning on Trailhead and bring this knowledge back to your organization as added value.
What Is the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform?
Introducing the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, the first iPaaS centralized platform that consolidates the API development lifecycle. The platform enables citizen developers (low-code, configuration users) to design, create, and manage ongoing integration via APIs. Anypoint is one product within the MuleSoft product suite, which is a subset of the greater Salesforce ecosystem. The Anypoint Platform offers different hosting options: on-premises, private cloud, or a fully managed iPaaS solution via CloudHub.
The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform provides a comprehensive suite of capabilities to design, analyze, build, test, and deploy efficient and effective endpoints at an enterprise level. In the next section, we’ll explore each of these in more detail.
Anypoint Platform Capabilities
Design: Anypoint Visualizer
Displays the “application network” for your organization and connects nodes together based on API endpoints between MuleSoft and external systems.
This visualization can be helpful for both inventorying and designing new integrations at scale. It is typically much easier to reuse an existing integration to meet a need than to construct a new one. The strength of connection between network nodes is based on recent traffic between them.
This tool has several uses, including, but not limited to, strategic architectural decisions, inventorying the enterprise IT system landscape, and determining the business priority of application integrations.
Source: MuleSoft
Design: Anypoint Exchange
The Anypoint Exchange is very similar to the Salesforce AppExchange. It allows organizations to search and utilize API development accelerators, such as templates and pre-configured API packages.
These assets are organized by industry (e.g. manufacturing), tags (e.g. trigger-enabled), lifecycle state (e.g. stable), and type (e.g. connectors). For reliability and security, a connectivity asset certification must be achieved before an asset is listed on the Exchange.
In terms of designing a comprehensive application network, the Exchange is a powerful resource for accelerating API development. Rather than investing resources to build integrations from scratch, there is a boost in GTM time for utilizing templates and accelerators from the Exchange.
Source: MuleSoft
Create: Anypoint API Designer
Anypoint API Designer allows for an easy and intuitive creation of API endpoints via either a text or visual editor. Assets, such as security schemas and data types, can be pulled from Exchange as part of the API Designer. The text editor allows for the design of methods, resources, parameters, and security, whereas the visual editor is better for an eagle-eye view of the API specification.
Source: MuleSoft
Create: Anypoint Runtime Manager
Anypoint Runtime Manager provides a comprehensive overview of all connected software applications, servers, and endpoints. It offers a centralized view of all of the above assets and facilitates easy access to deploy and manage them. Runtime Manager is flexible, allowing for the management of applications and deployments for both on-premises and CloudHub MuleSoft instances.
Monitoring is a key capability of this product, enabling users to view an application’s performance (and server, if on-premises). Part of this monitoring includes the configuration of event alerts – customizable email notifications that can be based on API requests, status codes, and more.
Create: Anypoint Studio
Anypoint Studio is the building block of the Anypoint Platform. This is MuleSoft’s built-in IDE that enables developers to write reliable code using standard debugging features, as well as modify API endpoints and connectors. Anypoint Studio accelerates development via editable templates that can be downloaded from the Anypoint Exchange. Finally, data can be manipulated using the proprietary MuleSoft Dataweave language for data transformation.
Management: API Analytics
API Analytics is the hub for all things related to metrics in the Anypoint Platform. This hub enables monitoring of endpoint performance, user engagement with endpoints, and security baselines. It can serve as a crucial action center, driving work to improve built endpoints and encourage better performance and usability. Monitoring these metrics can increase endpoint effectiveness and provide learning opportunities for further development on the Anypoint Platform.
Management: Anypoint Monitoring
Similar to Anypoint Analytics, Anypoint Monitoring allows for the real-time viewing of digital performance through alerts. Anypoint Monitoring is heavily focused on the performance of API endpoints – such as the number of requests and latency. This monitoring suite can also be comparative, meaning that different established endpoints can be compared against each other for troubleshooting and baselining.
Management: API Manager
API Manager is a powerful tool for creating APIs as well as managing APIs over time. API manager allows for an inventory of API, including details on API requests, integrated applications, and the status of the API.
API Manager can also be utilized to set policies for existing APIs and view APIs in non-production environments.
In addition to creating APIs, is it possible to see an API summary per endpoint (see below). API Manager allows for the creation of API instances that facilitate the management of already created endpoints.
Source: MuleSoft
Summary
The next step of IT maturity in organizations is to integrate their siloed systems via maintainable and scalable integration architecture and development. The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform provides a comprehensive suite of capabilities to design, analyze, build, test, and deploy efficient and effective endpoints at an enterprise level.
It is crucial for Salesforce professionals to learn how the ecosystem handles system integrations via MuleSoft, just as they would learn any other Salesforce capability. This article has offered a brief preview of the power of the Anypoint Platform, and I encourage professionals interested in system integrations to check out the Anypoint Platform help documentation and other reliable resources. Happy integrating!
