Author, Laurell K. Hamilton, wrote “Questions are great, but only if you have the answers.” Many of you have questions about the Anypoint Platform and our product team has the answers! Here is our second installment of our Anypoint Quarterly FAQ, where we answer the most frequently asked questions.
This quarter, we will focus on questions regarding the upcoming releases: Service Mesh, Access Management 2.0, as well as updates to Anypoint Exchange and SAP S/4HANA.
Questions on Service Mesh
Question: Can you give more context into Service Mesh and what advantages it offers?
Answer: Anypoint Service Mesh enables accelerated adoption of microservices by providing discoverability, management, and security for non-MuleSoft microservices. These non-MuleSoft microservices can be written using different languages and platforms, or can be deployed in different environments.
To alleviate issues arising from differences in these microservices, Anypoint Service Mesh ensures the following application management advantages:
- Provides resilient service-to-service communication using zero-trust policies to handle traffic control, fault tolerance and load balancing.
- Extends MuleSoft API Management capabilities to any non-Mule service, with policies, security, and analytics all applied directly from Anypoint Platform.
- Amplifies reuse of services with discovery of non-Mule services within Exchange, available to use in future projects.
Question: How are the cores counted when service mesh is installed?
Answer: Cores are counted per adapter, which is bound to a single Kubernetes namespace.
Question: What are non-mule services? How are non-mule services created?
Answer: Non-mule services are any microservice that is not leveraging the Mule runtime (like integration apps, pass through API proxies), all polyglot applications – Java, Ruby, Python, Node.
Question: Is the ServiceMesh functionality available for Mule Enterprise Licensed users?
Answer: Product will GA in Q1. Licensing and packaging will be announced along with it.
Question: What are the plans to link an existing RAML contract to a microservice endpoint?
Answer: Service Mesh supports REST services. You’ll be able to publish OAS definitions into Anypoint Platform and link the endpoint to a microservice.
Question: Are all policy types deployable to a managed service mesh endpoint?
Answer: At GA there will be four OOTB policies which are available for managing east-west traffic – Rate Limiting, Rate Limiting SLA, JWT and Client ID enforcement. Any data transformation & payload based policies are more suitable for central API Gateways.
Questions on Access Management 2.0
Question: There are some similarities between Teams and Roles. When should users be using Teams instead of Roles and vice versa?
Answer: Roles will be replaced by Teams, as Teams provide a superset of features in addition to Roles. Your existing roles will be available and for any net new access controls, corresponding permission will be available.
Question: Can team management in Access Management be controlled by AD groups? Can teams be used with External Identity group mapping? Are teams compatible with External Identity providers, such as Okta or Ping federate?
Answer: Yes, for those customers that have external identity setup using SAML, you can pass SAML attributes mapping them directly to Teams. The workflow is similar to what we currently use with external group mapping for Roles.
Question: Are teams compatible with External Identity providers, such as Okta or Ping federate?
Answer: Yes, for customers with external identity setup using SAML, you can pass SAML attributes mapping them directly to Teams. The workflow is very similar to what we do today with external group mapping for Roles.
Question: Do we have the traceability of these user and authorization actions?
Answer: All actions performed within the platform are sent to the Audit Log. This applies to both user actions or programmatic actions by connected applications.
Questions on Anypoint Exchange
Question: In Exchange search, if a match happens in more than one version of an asset, which one will show up in the search result?
Answer: The search result will show the latest Minor version that had the match. e.g. if 1.0.x, 1.1.x, 2.1.x, 3.2.x all had the match, 3.2.x will show up in the search result.
Question: In regards to consistent navigation, dependencies used to be shown per asset version. Now that we are moving to minor version level navigation, where will the dependencies show up?
Answer: Users will be able to perform all activities at asset version level, such as download, deprecate, delete, when they click on the contextual menu icon. One of those actions is called “Asset details.” That will open up a modal with more details pertaining to that particular asset version, which will contain information about the dependencies.
Questions on SAP S/4HANA
Question: Is the sap S/4HANA only available in Flow Designer?
Answer: SAP S/4HANA is available on both Studio and Flow Designer.
Question: What operations does the SAP S/4HANA OData Cloud Connector enable you to perform?
Answer: Anypoint Connector for SAP S/4HANA OData Cloud (SAP S/4HANA OData Cloud Connector) provides full support for the query, get, create, update, delete entities, and execute functions using the OData API exposed by SAP S/4HANA. The connector enables you to perform operations to:
- Create, update, and delete entities
- Retrieve a single entity
- Query multiple entities
- Invoke a remote function
If your question wasn’t answered above, be sure to log it within MuleSoft forums, part of the newly unveiled MuleSoft Help Center — your one-stop-shop for everything to be successful within Anypoint Platform.
