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
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Business context and problems faced
Online
Client
Corporate Network
(Head Quarter)DMZ
Primary
ESBBackend
Portal
Online-
Server
(*) as Reverse Proxy
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
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Agenda
• 1. Business context and problems faced
• 2. The idea of a service-oriented online
architecture
3.How and why we selected Mule
4.Overview and examples of Mule use cases
5.Best practices and learnings
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
(*) as Reverse Proxy
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
The idea of a service-oriented online architecture
Local
ESB
Corporate Network
(Head Quarter)
Primary
ESBBackend
Portal
Online-
Server
National Corporate
Network (USA)
Secondary
ESB
DMZ
Backend‘
Local Area
Network
(*) as Reverse Proxy
Web-
Server (*)
Web-
Server (*)
Web-
Server (*)
Browser
Online-
Client
Multiple portal and online serverblocks can be combined
to support different user groupsand network locations
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The idea of a service-oriented online architecture
Corporate Network
Primary
ESBBackend
Portal
Online-
Server
National Corporate
Network (USA)
Secondary
ESB
DMZ
Backend‘
Local Area
Network
Web-
Server (*)
Web-
Server (*)
(*) as Reverse Proxy
Local
ESB
Browser
Online-
Client
Web-
Server (*)
Portal
Online-
Server
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
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
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
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
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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
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■ 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
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■ The actual sending using an SMTP
connector is performed asynchronous
■ Custom transformer uses Velocity to
convert request object to email body
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
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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
■ 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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