MuleSoft

What is MuleSoft?

MuleSoft is a Salesforce company that provides numerous tools to build automations and integrations for various enterprise use cases. Its automation and integration tool is known as the Anypoint Platform. This platform helps businesses to seamlessly connect data, applications and devices across their on-premises and cloud computing environments.

MuleSoft was acquired by Salesforce in 2018. All MuleSoft products and solutions, including the Anypoint Platform, MuleSoft Composer and MuleSoft RPA are now available on www.salesforce.com.

MuleSoft and AnyPoint Platform explained

MuleSoft provides numerous enterprise solutions that enable businesses to make the most of automation and integrations. Using these solutions, organizations can integrate any system or application inside and outside of Salesforce for meaningful engagement across the entire business. They can also use hundreds of prebuilt templates, connectors and accelerators to connect data from multiple platforms and increase its value.

One of the most popular MuleSoft offerings, the Anypoint Platform, provides tools for integration, application programming interfaces (APIs) and automation, and numerous prebuilt assets to speed up application development and delivery.

With this platform, enterprise teams can do the following:

• Automate projects with clicks or code to save time and accelerate development.
• Streamline complex business processes.
• Unlock the value of real-time data and well-integrated systems.

Development teams can also use the Anypoint Platform to discover APIs built anywhere using their own continuous integration (CI)/continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. Or they can build APIs from scratch for almost any use case or protocol. The APIs enable centralized data accessibility that creates opportunities to improve processes and deliver intelligent customer experiences faster. APIs and reusable assets also increase enterprise agility, minimize rework and speed up time-to-market.

How MuleSoft enables data automation and integration

The Anypoint Platform lets organizations automate many workflows and processes to save time, and enhance workforce productivity and efficiency. Users can effortlessly build reusable and secure automations, components and workflows to boost productivity and deliver projects faster. They can also automate tasks with MuleSoft's no-code solutions that support automation and self-service with clicks instead of code.

The platform adopts a composable approach to connectivity that transforms every digital asset into a reusable product with all the necessary security, governance and compliance measures built in. It also integrates all the applications across the enterprise so people can access the most up-to-date information they need. Key to integration are composable APIs plus cloud-based and robotic process automation (RPA) bots that work together to pull data from legacy systems to unlock their value.

Components of Anypoint Platform

The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform includes these components and tools:

• API Designer. A web-based, graphical tool to quickly build and document quality, reliable and standardized APIs.
• Anypoint Connectors. Prebuilt connectors to build integrations with clicks instead of code.
• AnyPoint Code Builder. API and integration development tools to design, develop and deploy APIs from a single environment.
• MUnit. A native testing framework to perform unit testing and integration testing for APIs and Mule apps.
• Anypoint DataGraph. Tool that enables API reuse in a single request and unify APIs into one data service without having to write more code.

With these components, the Anypoint Platform gives enterprise customers a powerful tool set for building APIs, automations and integrations.

Compatible with any architecture and environment

The Anypoint Platform includes the Anypoint Flex Gateway that enables developers to adapt to any architecture or run in any environment. The gateway is flexible and fast, which allows teams to manage and secure any service, regardless of size, language or cloud. They can deploy to any target using a web UI or via CI/CD pipelines and reduce application response times and costs on a small footprint. Built to integrate seamlessly with DevOps and CI/CD workflows, the gateway delivers high performance even for demanding applications, plus enterprise security and manageability across any environment.

Anypoint also provides a fully managed infrastructure called CloudHub to run in the cloud with 99.999% uptime. This highly available platform as a service (PaaS) helps teams do the following:

• Scale automatically per changing demand.
• Distribute workloads per data residency requirements.
• Comply with various regulations out-of-the-box.

Benefits of building APIs with API Designer on Anypoint Platform

The MuleSoft Anypoint Platform simplifies API discovery and builds, which can accelerate application development and delivery. The single, unified platform can be used to design, build, secure and scale APIs and integrations in multiple protocols and test those in various ways.

Users can also validate conformance to governance rules during design to minimize additional review cycles.

The platform's API Designer provides a visual- or code-based guided experience to design and write API specs in OAS, RESTful API Modeling Language (RAML), GraphQL or AsyncAPI. It also provides a shareable, single-click mocking service to simulate expected behaviors and make changes as needed, plus a library of APIs, templates, examples and connectors to engage API consumers at any stage of the design process.

The API Designer's context-aware shelf provides suggestions to accelerate API design and real-time governance checks to standardize it. API developers can view autogenerated, interactive documentation in the platform's API console and share the ready API to Anypoint Exchange to drive collaboration and enable reuse. Saving APIs in Exchange also enables consumption within MuleSoft Flow Designer and Anypoint Studio. Developers can also monitor all APIs and integrations in real time and troubleshoot operations to resolve issues quickly.

Anypoint connectors speed up enterprise integrations

The Anypoint Platform provides hundreds of prebuilt cloud connectors that enable business teams to connect to any endpoint, including software as a service (SaaS) applications such as SAP and Salesforce. The connectors support data connections for many critical enterprise applications and industry standards. They also support integrations with cloud infrastructure and services in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, and support Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) and other open protocols to connect databases.

Every connector is tested and certified for production environments to deliver reliable connectivity. It's easy to use these connectors with one central configuration and built-in support for common integration requirements such as pagination, batch processing and data transformation. The platform also simplifies the management and standardization of all versions and authentication schemes across applications.

Benefits of MuleSoft Anypoint Platform

MuleSoft's low-code solutions free up time and enable teams to move faster and become more efficient. These versatile solutions accommodate multiple use cases and run in any architecture at scale. Teams using these solutions can quickly build APIs and integrations to accelerate application delivery and make the most of their data assets.

Anypoint protects sensitive data, governs all APIs and provides out-of-the-box compliance for ISO 27001, Service Organization Control 2 (SOC2), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and many other regulations. It includes contextual analytics so developers can make smarter API program decisions and easily manage all their APIs from a single platform. Finally, it provides built-in reliability, scalability and visibility to simplify operations, centralize monitoring and control, and improve enterprise resilience.

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