service oriented online architecture with mule

Service-Oriented Online Architecture with Mule

A different approach to building a SOA

Agenda

• 1. Business context and problems faced

2.The idea of a service-oriented onlinearchitecture

3.How and why we selected Mule

4.Overview and examples of Mule use cases

5.Best practices and learnings

2

Business context and problems facedExisting online infrastructure was

complex, expensiveto maintain and could not be used

by other portals

3

Corporate Network

(Head Quarter)

Portal

Distribution DMZ

Partner LAN

(*) as Reverse Proxy

Business logic and backend access in the portal needs to available to other portals

Server applications only run on specialized hardware and application platform

Everyone is talking to everyone, point-to-point communication is difficult to manage

Web-

Server (*)

Web-

Server (*)

Browser Oracle

DB2

BackendBackend

BackendBackend

Client-

ApplicationClient-

Application

DataPlatform

ComponentApplication

Platform

Online-

ServerServer-

ApplicationServer-

Application

- Spare Parts

- Technical Info

- …

An ESB-centric service-orientedonline architecture is

easier to manage and more extensible

4

Business context and problems faced

Online

Client

Corporate Network

(Head Quarter)DMZ

Primary

ESBBackend

Portal

Online-

Server


Local Area Network

Web-

Server (*)

Web-

Server (*)

Browser

■ The migration of the server applications to standardized

hardware proved to be rather difficult due to close coupling to

platform

■ To get rid of the application platform components we had to

identify the all required services for the online scenario

■ Then a light-weight surrogate based on Mule was implemented

to provide these services to the applications instead

■ The portal independent services had to be identified and

extracted from the portal

■ Access to all backend systems is now provided by one central

Mule ESB instance, implementing logging and security

■ The maintenance costs for the simplified architecture have

already decreased significantly

■ New server application instances can be deploy transparently

within hours instead of days now

Business context and problems facedThe goal was to simplify thearchitecture, unify the way

backend systems are accessed andcut operation costs

5

Agenda

• 1. Business context and problems faced

• 2. The idea of a service-oriented online

architecture




6

The improved service-oriented online architecture can be

composed using different buildingblocks

7

The idea of a service-oriented online architecture

Online

Client

Corporate Network

(Head Quarter)DMZ

Primary

ESBBackend

Portal

Online-

Server


Local Area Network

Web-

Server (*)

Web-

Server (*)

Web-

Server (*)

Local

ESB

Browser

A secondary ESB building blockenables the deployment

of dedicated online servers innational networks

8


Local

ESB

Corporate Network

(Head Quarter)

Primary

ESBBackend

Portal

Online-

Server

National Corporate

Network (USA)

Secondary

ESB

DMZ

Backend‘

Local Area

Network


Web-

Server (*)

Web-

Server (*)

Web-

Server (*)

Browser

Online-

Client

Multiple portal and online serverblocks can be combined

to support different user groupsand network locations

9


Corporate Network

Primary

ESBBackend

Portal

Online-

Server

National Corporate

Network (USA)

Secondary

ESB

DMZ

Backend‘

Local Area

Network

Web-

Server (*)

Web-

Server (*)


Local

ESB

Browser

Online-

Client

Web-

Server (*)

Portal

Online-

Server

Agenda

1.Business context and problems faced


• 3. How and why we selected Mule



10

■ We did not Google „open source ESB“ to select Mule …

■ Instead we did a qualitative and quantitative comparison of major open source ESB

products using different criteria:

■ Primary: professional maintenance, commercial support with SLAs, licensing, performance,

operations by IT department possible

■ Secondary: documentation, code quality, activity and size of community, Spring support, sync

and async communication, supported standards, app server integration, development tools

■ Mule quickly emerged as the favored ESB product, followed by Fuse ESB and WSO2

■ Static analysis of the Mule sources (Sonar,

Structure101) showed acceptable quality

■ Modularization and project structure looks well-

thought-out and enables light-weight deployment

■ Good code quality, in spite of found violations and

partially low documentation

■ Test coverage is reasonably high to ensure correct

function in case of changes

How and why we selected MuleBased on the proposed architecture

scenarios we couldidentify the requirements on the

ESB product

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■ Chosen products: Mule ESB, WSO2

and Fuse ESB

■ Are all 3 uses cases supported?

■ Development model: used frameworks,

supported IDEs, build tools?

■ Learning curve: How good is the

documentation? Clear API?

■ Development effort: How long does it

take to implement the uses cases?

■ Mule ESB scored best in comparison,

closely followed by WSO2

How and why we selected MuleImplementation of a small PoC prototype to get a first

impression of the chosen products

121 2 3WS-Call POJO Provider External WS-Call (Asnyc) WS-Proxy with Transform

■ Different load scenarios with constant and

increasing parallel requests (Apache JMeter)

■ Measurement of performance relevant

metrics using Software-EKG

■ Live profiling of system behavior (JProfiler)

■ All findings have been reported to MuleSoft

■ Together with MuleSoft we were able to solve

all the found issues:

■ MuleSoft supplied a working patch for the

Registry synchronization issue within 2 days

■ Other issues could simply be addressed using

the optimized configuration parameters (thread

pool settings, …) supplied to us

■ This was decisive for the confidence and the

final decision for Mule ESB

How and why we selected MuleIntensive performance tests uncovered several findings

(with Mule 3.1.1) …

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Agenda




• 4. Overview and examples of Mule use

cases

• 5. Best practices and learnings

14

Clustered deployment of Mule ESBas a web application

for scalability and high availability■Requirement: Mule ESB had to bedeployed as a Javaweb application to beoperated by the ITdepartment

■Embedding Mule intoa web app is pretty

• straight forward using the a context listener

■Custom listener

15

Overview and examples of Mule use cases

Overview and examples of Mule use casesUnified web service interface to access details user

from heterogeneous data sources

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■ Access to the endpoint is controlledusing a Spring security filter

■ Each data source has specific POJO implementation or private flow

■ Choice is based on payload using a Groovy evaluator

■ Only minor Java code required

■ Web service interface and types

■ Custom transformers

■ Choice uses CXF operation header

■ XSLT to transform XML/RPC to

JAXB XML structure

Overview and examples of Mule use casesWeb service to XML/RPC service

adapter to access theBZST service for simple and

qualified VAT checks

17

■ Web service interface and types defined as

POJI and POJOs with JAX-WS annotations

■ The service component only performs

validation and preprocessing of request

Overview and examples of Mule use casesWeb service to email service

adapter to send supportrequests to a ticketing backend

system

18

■ The actual sending using an SMTP

connector is performed asynchronous

■ Custom transformer uses Velocity to

convert request object to email body

Agenda





• 5. Best practices and learnings

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■ Mule provides several built-in components

to test Mule XML and flow definitions

■ The MuleFunctionalTest allowed us to test

our flows within the IDE

■ No deployment to a standalone instance

required, thus reducing turn-around times

■ The MuleClient is not really intuitive to use

■ Smart combination of SoapUI test cases

together with mock services allowed 100%

local and off-site development

■ Learning: develop as much as possible as

POJOs and use „traditional“ unit testing

■ Learning: take the time to write a good

mock for the service you are integrating

Best practices and learningsTest driven development usingMuleFunctionalTests,

SoapUI tests and mock services

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■ „The Leanest, Meanest ESB: Mule ESB is the world's most efficient Enterprise

Service Bus” (http://www.mulesoft.com/mule-esb-small-footprint)

■ We went well below the mentioned figures by building a custom Mule distribution

tuned and optimized for our specific use cases

■ Based on the default distribution assembly XML found in the Mule community

sources, we

1. got rid of everything not required in production, mainly docs and examples, but also not

required Tanuki EXE wrapper binaries, etc.pp.;

2. selected only the required Mule modules and transports our uses cases really required, this

reduced the amount of 3rd party libs significantly;

3. used Maven dependency management to have full control of all used 3rd party libraries,

used more recent versions where possible (e.g. Spring, CXF, Saxon)

4. added our Mule apps and their dependencies, then repackaged

■ Thorough load tests lead to optimized JVM parameters and high performance:-Xmx=128m -Xms=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=64m -XX:NewRatio=2 -XX:SurvivorRatio=12 -XX:+UseParallelGC

-XX:+UseParallelOldGC

Best practices and learningsBuilding a custom Mule distribution

for 100% control ofall dependencies and optimal

performance

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96 MB

30 MB

37 MB

http://www.mulesoft.com/mule-esb-small-footprint

■ A migration of the whole infrastructure in one go would have been impossible; the system needs to be available around the clock

■ Instead a staged migration of the infrastructurecomponents and applications has been used:

■ Phase 1: Migration of all online servers, application by application, introduction of the primary ESB with first required services

■ Phase 2: Integration of a new online portal, operated inparallel to the old portal infrastructure

■ Phase 3: Migration of all „legacy“ portals to access the new online infrastructure components

■ After each phase the behavior of the new components was monitored closely to detect any problems in production

■ The services and backend systems integrated by theprimary ESB instance constantly grew (I might still begrowing in next phases)

Best practices and learnings

No big bang: start small and migrate in several phases

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Questions & Answers

Technology

service oriented online architecture with mule