Getting the most out of MuleSoft and AWS

As you probably already know, MuleSoft is a market-leading tool for APIs and integrations. MuleSoft’s strengths play well as a leader in the integration space. And, combining MuleSoft with AWS allows organizations to take advantage of the strengths of each platform in a better-together model.

When does a hybrid model make sense?

Combining technologies in a hybrid integration model is not only common; it’s recommended. Combining MuleSoft and AWS creates a complete and robust solution for many use cases, allowing you to leverage a straightforward solution from one to increase the other’s performance and use. For instance, MuleSoft intentionally does not provide large-scale cloud storage. Instead, MuleSoft offers Object Store for use cases where key/value data needs to be accessed quickly. AWS, of course, does offer large scale cloud storage.

11 AWS services that work well with MuleSoft

1. Amazon API Gateway: Some organizations mandate the use of AWS for certain APIs. If that’s the case, you can use the Amazon API Gateway and proxy to MuleSoft APIs behind the scenes, or vice versa.
2. AWS Lambda: For certain workloads that need massive scale, parallel processing, and can be easily coded using the skills your organization has in-house, AWS Lambda is an excellent choice.
3. Amazon S3: MuleSoft does not come out of the box with a solution for long-term object storage. You can use a file system, Object Store, or other MuleSoft offerings if they fulfill your requirements, but S3 can act as a durable, scalable file system for object storage, which can be great for saving payloads from MuleSoft. MuleSoft has created a connector for S3 which can be found in Exchange.
4. Amazon SQS: MuleSoft’s Anypoint MQ is an excellent queue offering. However, in cases where it’s not part of your MuleSoft license or when your organization mandates that queues be centralized and visible outside of the MuleSoft platform, Amazon SQS is an ideal queuing partner for the platform. MuleSoft has created a connector for SQS which can be found in Exchange.
5. Amazon SNS: Anypoint MQ is great for topics, too, but again you may have a mandate to use a centralized and visible topic solution outside of MuleSoft, or it may not be part of your license. In those cases, SNS is a great topic solution. MuleSoft has created a connector for SNS which can be found in Exchange.
6. Amazon Kinesis: For collecting, analyzing, and streaming data in real-time, Kinesis is an excellent choice. Real-time needs are becoming more common in the digital transformation era, and combining MuleSoft with Kinesis can provide the real-time streaming and analytics capability for these use cases. MuleSoft has created a connector for Kinesis which can be found in Exchange.
7. Amazon RDS: MuleSoft intentionally does not include relational database storage as part of its solution. Amazon’s RDS can stand in, offering a fully managed, scalable, fault-tolerant database solution in the cloud.
8. Amazon DynamoDB: If you have low latency data access needs, or if your organization mandates that key/value storage must be visible outside of MuleSoft or in the AWS ecosystem, DynamoDB is an optimal solution. It offers low latency access and data writes and edits and is a fully managed, auto-scaling, durable, NoSQL data storage solution. MuleSoft has created a connector for DynamoDB which can be found in Exchange.
9. Amazon EC2: If you can’t deploy to CloudHub, MuleSoft’s managed cloud, another deployment option is an AWS EC2 server. EC2 can be managed using DevOps best practices in auto-scaling groups, load-balanced, using high availability architecture. In fact, CloudHub uses EC2 in the background to deploy your MuleSoft workers, making it an ideal deployment target for the MuleSoft runtime plane.
10. Amazon EKS: For organizations adopting the most out of the elastic capabilities of the cloud, you can deploy Anypoint Runtime Fabric on Amazon EKS. This allows MuleSoft’s cloud-like Runtime Fabric deployment option to be deployed on Amazon’s highly available, secure Kubernetes offering.
11. AWS CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, CodeBuild: Following best practices, MuleSoft should be integrated with a CI/CD pipeline. AWS makes it easy to create and automate your integration pipeline by combining MuleSoft with the AWS DevOps offerings.

You will notice that many of these services you can use from AWS in a better together model with MuleSoft utilize the serverless model. Serverless comes with many benefits and usually makes for a great hybrid model between MuleSoft capabilities and the ultimate scalability and pricing of AWS serverless services.
In part two of this series, we will discuss some great use cases where it makes sense to combine MuleSoft and AWS. Watch our webinar to learn how to extend AWS capabilities with MuleSoft.