All About MuleSoft Products

This post helps in understanding the MuleSoft’s licensing model better. To start with lets see how you can get started with MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform. 

  MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform consists of following products:

1) Mule Runtime (the engine that runs Mule applications): Cost for this product depends on the number of cores you run mule runtimes on - explained in detail below) 

2) Runtime Manager (Management of Mule applications that allows deployment, alerting, monitoring etc) - Is part of the platform subscription and so no additional cost. 

3) API Manager and API Analytics (API Management solution that allows management of the APIs and analytics) - Needs to be purchased separately as an Add-on 

4) Anypoint Exchange (Repository of APIs which helps in making APIs discoverable and reusable) - is part of the platform subscription and so no additional cost. 

5) Connectors (Adapters that help to integrate to most popular systems) - Select connectors are part of the platform subscription. Premium connectors need to be purchased separately. 

6) AnypointMQ - Cloud Messaging solution - Needs to be purchased separately - Costs depend on number of messages required per month. 7) Anypoint Enterprise Security - (Collection of security features that enforce secure access to information in Mule applications) - Is part of the platform subscription and so no additional cost. 

Refer to the article https://www.mulesoft.com/prod-subscription-plans to get further details on subscription plans. 

On-Premise Licensing

If you run your mule applications on on-premise Mule Runtimes, the licensing costs corresponds to the number of CPU cores that the Mule runtime server has. So lets say you have a VMWare host that is having 1 CPU core with X GB RAM and you deploy a Mule enterprise edition runtime on this VM. This setup would mean that you have utilized 1 core out of your available Mule subscriptions. 

  Some FAQ’s related to on-premise licensing model

1) If my server / VM has more than one CPU cores lets say 4 but I am running only 1 Mule Runtime, how many cores am I consuming?

With this setup by default, it would mean that you will utilize 4 Mule cores out of your available Mule subscriptions. If your intention is to utilize only 1 Mule core, then you will have to set a CPU affinity to Mule Runtime. Refer to the knowledge base article https://support.mulesoft.com/s/article/How-to-set-CPU-affinity-for-Mule-ESB-process for details. 

  2) If my VM has 1 CPU core, can I run more than 1 Mule Runtime instances and how many Mule runtime cores will I consume? 

From licensing point of view,  you will still consume 1 Mule runtime core out of your total subscription. However, as per hardware requirement for Mule runtime, at least 1 core is required. https://docs.mulesoft.com/mule-user-guide/v/3.9/hardware-and-software-requirements 

3) Does RAM size on the server affect my Mule Core license consumption? 

No. You can adjust RAM size as per requirements for your application. Mule runtime cores are only associated with CPU cores. 

4) If I deploy Mule runtimes for high availability on 2 servers and I deploy same set of APIs on both servers, how many cores am I consuming assuming both servers have 1 CPU cores? 

Mule runtime subscription doesn’t depend on APIs you deploy. In the above scenario, you will be consuming 2 mule runtime cores. 

CloudHub Licensing Licensing for CloudHub is pretty straightforward. Subscription is available as number of vCores. vCores are available through different sizes of CloudHub workers. 

  Worker Sizes

0.1 vCores + 500 MB Heap Memory

0.2 vCores + 1 GB Heap Memory

1 vCores + 1.5 GB Heap Memory

2 vCores + 3.5 GB Heap Memory

With this blog, I start my journey to learn MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform. MuleSoft has grown quite well in the past few years and has provided excellent solutions around API management, iPaaS (Integration Platform As A Service), ESB and Integration.

With this post, I am sharing my first hand experience with the Anypoint Studio. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Studio is an easy-to-use eclipse based IDE. This IDE allows to design, test and debug your Mule applications. Anyone who has experience using Eclipse will take no time in understanding all the panels that Anypoint Studio provides.

Following are the things you would typically do in Anypoint Studio for developing a Mule application

1) Create a new Mule project. 2) Drag and drop a Mule Flow. A mule flow defines what the application is trying to do. 3) Drag and drop an Inbound endpoint that defines how the application gets triggered. 4) Keep enriching the flow by adding components, transformers, connectors, flow control as required.   5) Save the project. 6) Test it in Anypoint Studio. 7) Optionally debug the application if troubleshooting is required.

If you are building an API and if you follow a Design-first approach (which you should), you would typically design your API with a RAML using the Anypoint Design studio. We will see how to use it in another post. For now, lets assume you have the RAML available for your project.  

Above snapshot shows the Anypoint Studio. The workspace has just one project and on the top left panel, you will see the folder structure within a Mule project. 

One of the quite useful features of Anypoint Studio is its integration with Anypoint Exchange. Anypoint Exchange is a place to find several examples, templates, APIs and other ready-to-use resources. 

The black “X” like icon on the tool bar is for navigating to Exchange. Anypoint Studio enables downloading of any existing project or template that suits your needs. This feature helps in reducing the development time to a great extent. For example, if you need to build an application that involves batch processing, you can search Anypoint Exchange with batch as a keyword as shown below:

In the next post, I will write on how to develop and test a simple project and while doing that we will explore other features of Anypoint Studio. Stay tuned :-)

Disclaimer: The information in this weblog is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights.