On Tuesday, December 10th, I went to the Charlotte MuleSoft Meetup to hear thought leaders talk about how APIs can be discovered for reuse and tested using MUnit. I also learned about features to be released in 2020 about a service mesh based on a microservice architecture. This was the Carolina’s fourth meeting this year and the group’s leaders are excited to grow the quarterly events as MuleSoft’s architectural footprint expands.
With about 30 attendees, the event featured various presentations and a robust Q&A session. Of course, no Meetup is complete without pizza and adult beverages beforehand, which we all enjoyed at the GoodRoad CiderWorks, our host for the evening.
API Autodiscovery – API Promotion
First, Avinash Vaddi, presented on MuleSoft API Autodiscovery. As detailed in his summary below:
API manager provides a structured mechanism to associate an API with a deployed application. The Auto Discovery capability allows other developers that want to use an application to “autodiscover” the APIs associated with the application in order for a developer to leverage for the desired application. This process is a key concept of reuse in an API led strategy.
MUnit in Mule4
Next, Diane Kesler, MUnit to facilitate testing, debugging, and helps to ensure quality assurance of data. An interesting capability is the before and after input and result of an event processor by using the spy function. A set up great testing reports are available to assist with debugging code.
Testing tools are a key to efficiently testing your code and ensuring processing integrity. MUnit allows for both unit and integration testing with the capability to look at data before and after being processed by the API. The results of testing are portrayed visually in a testing portal and well as reporting. These tools are especially helpful in accelerating the testing process, documenting the testing process, and to help refactor any necessary changes to ensure complete and secure processing of data. Having these native tools helps to facilitate testing on the APIs built within MuleSoft.
Microservices and its Discoverability, Governance with a Service Mesh
The last presentation was especially impressive. Aravind Ramadugu, talked about the power of using a service mesh in a Kubernetes cluster to manage different services. This technology will be released in 2020. A brief portrayal is below:
Now a loosely coupled set of services running on disparate systems can be governed using API policies and allow these APIs to be discoverable in a SOA environment. The agile, often fragmented SOA environment will now be better controlled, allowing for easier reuse to help promote an API led strategy using the Service Mesh technology. These capabilities are similar to APIs that are contained in Exchange which were highlighted in the first presentation above.
For mere details, check out the Charlotte December Mule meetup slide deck
The meetup group gets together once per quarter and the organizers actively solicit feedback.
Interested in joining the Carolina MuleSoft Meetup group? Please do!
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