Pick any application that you use often. There’s a good chance that the application has an intuitive interface, high performance, continuous availability, and it quickly adapts to your needs. In order to create such a seamless experience, the application undergoes regular feature updates, manages irregular traffic upticks or and keeps up with new security requirements. It is very likely that the application is using APIs and microservice architectures.
The demand for such short software release cycles coupled with maintenance nightmares of operating monolithic applications led engineering leaders to adopt microservices and distributed architectures. But why do most organizations report challenges in implementing microservices? While breaking up a monolith, different teams that own each service in an application prefer to use diverse languages and technologies fit for their own use case.
As part of building applications and architectures in a multi-cloud world ridden with diverse landscapes, organizations are investing in these four areas:
- Universal visibility by providing access to all APIs
- High performant and versatile gateways to support modern architectures
- Consistent in security and governance while operating in diverse environments
- Creating vibrant API ecosystems to maximize the value of API investments
Today, MuleSoft is introducing Anypoint Flex Gateway, a system designed to control and secure APIs running anywhere with ultrafast response times and a small footprint. Flex Gateway is built to seamlessly integrate with DevOps and CI/CD workflows, delivering the performance required for most demanding applications and security required across any environment.
We will explore how Flex Gateway answers your common gateway questions and provide you with next steps in accessing the product.
Secure traffic to services
A primary API management requirement in microservices is a gateway that can safely expose microservices to external users with the right level of protection and governance. Along with north-south traffic protection, each interservice communication needs to be protected to ensure that unwanted consumers aren’t introducing threats to your network.
Flex Gateway can be deployed to manage traditional north-south traffic patterns or as a container sidecar for east west traffic or ingress controller across any container cluster. It ensures the north-south and east-west traffic is protected through strict authentication, authorization and encryption. MuleSoft is providing several out-of-the-box policies for compliance, quality of service, security, and troubleshooting that covers most common use cases. Beyond protection, Flex Gateway also provides fine-grained traffic control and fault tolerance to ensure resilience even at peak traffic.
Operate in any environment
With many services owned by different teams, establishing consistent policies and managing them across different consoles is an uphill task. Flex Gateway is a cloud-native gateway that can run in virtually any environment — any physical hardware or VM, cloud or on-prem, and in containerized environments — with support for Kubernetes, Docker containers, and VM/cloud instances running Linux. Flex Gateway connects with Anypoint Platform control plane to extend the control and security policies to every service in your environment. This creates consistency in how service traffic is maintained and simplicity in maintaining a control plane for all services.
Minimize maintenance and operations
One of the biggest sources of friction to adopting a new gateway is the need to configure, maintain, and continuously operate another piece of software. Flex Gateway can be installed in minutes using a handful of commands. It can be configured natively using the web interface, CLI, or with declarative configuration to seamlessly manage updates along with updates to your applications via your CI/CD pipelines. Configurations and policy changes are reloaded in real-time to ensure zero downtime with no lag in serving customer requests.
Furthermore, administrators can now easily track their monthly Flex Gateway usage through new reports in the admin console. With this report, customers can gain visibility and insights into their usage to appropriately manage their licenses over time.
Learn more about Anypoint Flex Gateway
At MuleSoft Transform 2021 we announced our vision for Universal API management on Anypoint Platform and how Flex Gateway is at the bedrock of our vision. At TrailblazerDX, we highlighted our new products that power Universal API management on Anypoint Platform.
See the full list of products and capabilities that enablement Universal API Management on Anypoint Platform:
- Flex Gateway
- API Governance
- API Community Manager
- API Experience Hub (coming soon)
- Anypoint DataGraph
- API Designer
- API cataloging with the updated Anypoint Platform CLI (coming soon)
- API Manager
We’re excited to see these products in the hands of our community of developers, product managers, and architects. We look forward to how you will use them to enable your composable enterprise.
If you want to see the Flex Gateway in action, check out our product spotlight video or platform page. We are excited for you to try the product and use it to build modern applications and architectures. Check out our developer tutorials to get started quickly with Flex Gateway. If you missed MuleSoft Transform or TrailblazerDX, you can now watch the sessions on demand. Make sure to register for MuleSoft CONNECT to catch these products in action!
