Microservices and DevOps are Better Together with MuleSoft

Microservices and DevOps are technologies that are trending and have emerged into enterprises in the past decade. Both practices are intended to deliver technology with a single solution, greater agility and operational efficiencies for enterprises.

Microservice Architecture emerged from DevOps ideologies that came into being from companies, for example for apps like :Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Google, etc. All these establishments had monolithic applications which advanced into decomposed services and then communicated via RESTful APIs to become the announcer of Microservice Architecture.

What is a Microservice Architecture?

James Lewis and Martin Fowler gave us the best definition of Microservice architectures:

The Microservice architecture style provides an approach to building larger apps as a suite of smaller services, where each service:

  • Is built around business capability
  • Runs its own process
  • Communicate via a lightweight mechanism
  • Is independently deployable by automated deployment machinery

As a result, Microservice promotes business flexibility, which is achieved if new feature requests have the maximum probability of impacting only one Microservice, using DevOps team to fix the problem quickly, fast retest with automation, and redeploy the Microservice.

Microservices and DevOps Changing the World of IT Together

Microservices-driven architecture introduces change, which is often well-received by those creating modern connecting applications and those embracing the change are finding that productivity is increasing at an astonishing rate. Solutions can be delivered quickly for those requesting flexible, scalable applications. For DevOps fields, Microservices brings some significant benefits, including:

  • Deployability: Microservice fuels the ability to roll out new versions of a service. That is due to shorter build, test, and deploy cycles. Microservice can also incorporate flexibility needed to employ service-specific persistence, replication, security, and monitoring configuration.
  • Availability: To release a new version of a particular service needs a very little downtime, on the other hand rolling out a new version of a service in the monolithic application usually needs a full restart for the entire monolith.
  • Scalability:We can scale Microservices easily using pools, clusters, grids. Because of that deployment characteristic, microservices are a great match for the elasticity of the cloud.
  • Reliability: If there is a fault in a Microservice it only affects the Microservice and its consumers. When a monolithic application is at fault, the entire monolith may fail.
  • Management: Microservices can make use of agile methodology, where the application development efforts are distributed within teams that are smaller and work independently.

How MuleSoft come into play with Microservices?

MuleSoft, being a life cycle api management tool, provides a plethora of tools for defining, securing, managing, and deploying REST-driven applications. MuleSoft, as an integration tool, provides a standard message-oriented approach to data movement and is intended to work with data wherever it resides.

We can embrace Microservices architecture and implement granular services on the CloudHub independently, which can scale up or down without impacting any other services. Each service or system api is created as a separate application containing the mediation flow required for the underlying requirement. Every application can be managed independently.

Alternatively, we can also set up Docker, Kubernetes on-premises and then deploy a container comprising of an image that is made up of JVM, Mule runtime, and Mule App layers.

DevOps and API Life Capabilities on Anypoint Platform

Mulesoft anypoint Platform provides a unified suite of design, management and runtime capabilities to make it easy for organizations to address the full API lifecycle. Mulesoft anypoint Platform's component guide developers from design to implementation to production and beyond—enabling discovery and self-service. Each of the steps mentioned above has certain aspects that can be automated. Most developers are familiar with the build stage; work done in Anypoint Studio can be easily plugged into your continuous integration platform, leveraging some of the technologies that were mentioned earlier: GitHub for version control, Maven for dependencies management and build automation, JUnit and MUnit for test automation, and JIRA or ServiceNow for issue and service management.

When the code is ready to be sent, MuleSoft customers often use Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, or HP ALM for both deployment automation and the orchestration of release processes across a number of different environments: dev, test, stage, and production. Docker is quickly gaining popularity amongst customers since it reduces the complexities of continuous deployment, and the Mule runtime can be shipped in a Docker container. And through the management agent, Anypoint Platform for APIs and Anypoint Platform CLI, customers can further automate processes using configuration automation and management tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt, instead of the Anypoint Platform user interface.

DevOps and APIs – The Perfect Partners

With an api-led connectivity approach, every asset becomes a managed API, discoverable through self-service with no loss of control. Organizations are already embracing this approach to become more agile, efficient, and innovative.

The marriage of DevOps api-led connectivity will not be easy, it requires a change in the mindset as to where the assets are produced with the intent that they will be consumed by others in the business. Basically, central IT needs to change to become an enabler of reusable, self-service consumption.

How Royal Cyber Can Help?

Royal Cyber adopts DevOps best practices with capabilities for the full API lifecycle on MuleSoft. We provide our teams with dedicated DevOps and MuleSoft experts who build, operate, secure and automate infrastructure with secure API’s. For more information on how we can achieve this, you can email us at [email protected] or visit www.royalcyber.com.

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