A journey from MuleSoft to Serverless Integration
Is MuleSoft becoming “legacy” platform ?
In the current highly volatile market trend the cost optimisation, infinite scalability and agile development tools are very vital for any enterprise digital roadmap. The fast growing trend of FaaS world with AWS Lambda, Google Cloud function and Azure Fn has already received recognition of small, medium and large enterprises and this indicates that the move from the iPaaS to FaaS is natural and unavoidable. This move opens a new world of Serverless Integration.
The key features of serverless integration are
Infrastructure Ready — No need to provision or manage servers.
Scalability — Services will automatically scale to support the rate of the incoming request, including the ability to scale to zero.
Cost-Efficient — Leverage the subsecond metering of your cloud provider to reduce cost. Pay only for integration services only when they run.
Quick turn around — Enterprise can now focus 100% on functionality and make quick changes based on customer feedback.
Kumologica is one of the early players in this space which brings the benefits of the low-code integration capability of traditional integration like MuleSoft to the new world of Serverless. It provides a drag and drop visual designer and low code approach to ensure the greatest speed and flexibility to support a wide range of integrations compatible with most of the platforms and cloud providers.
In this article we are going to migrate an existing Mulesoft flow into Kumologica.
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Use Case
In this use case we will be building a simple ItemAvailability API flow which will invoke an external system (warehouse unit) via HTTP rest endpoint. Based on the item type field in the request the request will be routed to the appropriate warehouse unit. Warehouse unit A provides response in XML format whereas warehouse unit B responds in JSON format. The response from the warehouse units will be transformed to a canonical data structure in JSON format.
Below is the flow logic that will be implemented on Kumologica and MuleSoft.
Implementation
Here we are implementing the flow logic provided in the above use case section using Kumologica and MuleSoft.
Note: The implementation covers a flow having a small set of nodes or processors in Kumologica and MuleSoft. For more detailed information you can reach out to us and we can provide you with deep dive demos.
MuleSoft
The flow represented in the below is a MuleSoft flow built following the above given flow logic.
Kumologica
The diagram below represents a Kumologica flow built to mirror the same functionality expressed in the Mulesoft flow.
Implementation dissection
Let’s now analyse and compare each and every elements used in Kumologica and MuleSoft flow on the above show cases implementations. The below table shows the connectors and processors in MuleSoft mapped against the appropriate nodes in Kumologica.
Note: Dataweave is a proprietary technology from MuleSoft for expression based data mapping whereas Kumologica Datamapper uses JSONata technology for doing the data transformation.
A simple API flow in MuleSoft always starts with an HTTP listener which is ready to accept the request whereas in Kumologica this is done by EventListener node. Any flow in Kumologica is explicitly ended using and EventListener end node. Both Kumologica and MuleSoft has necessary components to achieve the VETRO capabilities.(Validation, Enrichment, Transformation, Routing and Orchestration)
Kumologica and MuleSoft comes with wide variety of connectors and nodes capable of connecting both legacy systems as well as technology protocols. Visit the following link to know more about each nodes in Kumologica. https://docs.kumologica.com/docs/references/
Deployment
MuleSoft flows are deployed on CloudHub which is a cloud based platform for running mule applications. Kumologica applications can be deployed on any cloud provider of your choice that avoids the cloud provider locking.
Kumologica flows are deployed either as a Lambda in AWS or as a function in Google or Azure based on the Kumologica runtime you choose.
Conclusion
This article presents how easy it is to develop an integration flow or an API flow in Kumologica Designer similar to MuleSoft and gaining all the benefits of Serverless world.
To test the above given ItemAvailability Kumologica flow you can download and import into Kumologica designer.
Remember Kumologica is totally free to download and use. Go ahead and give it a try, we would love to hear your feedback. In the meantime, if there is any specific use case that you would like to see in a future article please let us know in the comments section.
