Slides Cosenza MuleSoft Meetup - Flex Gateway

Slides del MuleSoft Meetup Group di Cosenza del 15 Ottobre 2024. In questa occasione abbiamo parlato di Anypoint Flex Gateway.

1. October 15
th
, 2024
Cosenza MuleSoft Meetup Group
Anypoint Flex Gateway
Francesco Vulcano

2. 2
●Manager at Cap4 Lab Italy (Cosenza)
●Senior Integration Engineer
●Bsc in Computer Science, from Università della Calabria.
About me

3. Anypoint Flex Gateway

4. 4
Flex Gateway: What is and why?
A gateway is a component that acts as an intermediary between two systems.
In particular, the Flex Gateway:
●It is lightweight and high-performance
●It is flexible in execution environments
●It is integrated with Anypoint Platform
●Decentralized management
●Security and control
It can be deployed anywhere, in cloud, on-premise or containerized environments such as
kubernetes and docker. It is an effective solution in all those contexts where performance is
essential and traffic is high.
Its costis based on the volume of the API requests.

5. 5
Connected mode vs local mode
The Flex Gateway can be connected in two different modes:
●Connected Mode:the gateway is fully connected to the Mulesoft Control Plane. This mode
allows you to centralize all API management within Anypoint Platform. In the Runtime
Manager you can deploy and configure Flex Gateway replicas, while all API lifecycle and
policy configuration can be managed with the API Manager.
●Local Mode:the gateway is mostly disconnected from the Mulesoft Control Plane, acting as a
standalone gateway, connecting to the Control Plane only for logging and reporting usage
metrics.
In local mode, all application configurations and policies are managed through locally stored
configuration files.
Local mode can be useful for creating CI/CD pipelines for application deployments.

6. MuleSoft Flex Gateway is considered lighter than Mule API Gateway, here are the main reasons
that make Flex Gateway a leaner and more performant solution:
●It does not require Mule Runtime,eliminating many of the complex features that are needed
for integration and orchestration, reducing the use of resources.
●Minimalistic design,focused exclusively on managing API traffic, with less overhead related
to additional features.
●Optimized for cloud-native and containerized environments,where resources must be
managed efficiently and dynamically.
●Decentralized and scalable distribution, which allows for leaner management of resources.
●Independence from Anypoint Platform,even though Flex Gateway can be integrated with
Anypoint Platform for centralized management of APIs, it can also work in standalone mode,
which makes it more independent and lightweight.
Flex Gateway vs Mule API Gateway
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7. API Proxy vs Flex Gateway
The difference between a MuleSoft API Proxy and MuleSoft Flex Gateway is primarily in
architecture, functionality, and deployment flexibility. While both are tools used to manage and
secure APIs, each has a different focus and is used in specific scenarios.
-MuleSoft API Proxy is best suited for those who simply want to add management and security
policies to an existing API, with centralized management through the Anypoint Platform.
-MuleSoft Flex Gateway is a more advanced solution, designed for distributed and cloud-native
environments, where high performance and deployment flexibility are needed.
Flex Gateway can apply security and management policies on APIs, but with greater scalability
and flexibility for complex environments than API Proxies. It can apply policies such as
authentication, authorization, rate limiting, etc., both locally (with locally stored configuration files)
and through the Anypoint Platform.
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8. 8
Deployment models
There are 4 different Flex gateway deployment models, depending on the use case the
architecture may vary:
●Standalone deployment
●Ingress deployment
●Egress deployment
●Sidecar deployment
For the practical part the Standalone deployment will be used

9. Use case
First of all, the API will be created in Java with Spring boot.
Then there will be the creation and configuration of the flex gateway in connected mode using a
Standalone deployment,and it will be distributed using Docker.
Finally, the application of routes and policies will be shown.
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10. Showing a working implementation and configuration of Flex Gateway
Live demo

11. Monitoring and alerts
You can set up dashboards to monitor the performance of your APIs. For example, number of
requests, number of failed requests, and response time.
The Flex Gateway, when running in connected mode, sends performance data to the Anypoint
platform.
However, the information that is collected is specific to the resources that the Docker container is
using, such as:
●Utilization of the CPUassigned to the container.
●Use of the container's memory.
●Network and I/O metricsrelated to the API traffic handled by the gateway.
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12. 1.Mulesoft documentation web page https://docs.mulesoft.com/gateway/latest/
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References

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What’s next?

14. Thank you
and see you next time!