The rise of microservices with Anypoint Service Mesh

MuleSoft has announced Anypoint Service Mesh, a new solution that dramatically simplifies how companies can discover, manage and secure microservices. Anypoint Service Mesh brings security and reliability to any microservices-based application, regardless of language or deployment model, freeing developers from custom code. Customers can also now publish and discover microservices in a marketplace, allowing developers across an organization to find and reuse them while IT maintains security and control. With this major new release of the Anypoint Platform, companies can now fully realize the benefit of microservices to innovate faster, deliver differentiated customer experiences and increase operational efficiency.

The rise of microservices

Microservices are a way to rapidly build new customer experiences by exposing data and functionality as a collection of loosely coupled services – the value comes from bringing together various microservices to solve business needs. With microservices, organizations can quickly adapt to changing customer requests and demands, as well as offer services that create a competitive edge.

However, as more and more microservices are built and organized around business capabilities, organizations end up with complex environments that can be costly and difficult to operate. Loosely coupled services require understanding the dependencies between services in order to minimize the pain and effort of making changes later. Making changes, whether for functional or security or scalability reasons, requires rewiring a set of dependent services and applications, causing errors, unexpected side effects, and slowdowns. That is on top of the increasing need to secure this maze of dependencies. This complexity can stifle innovation, negating the very promise of microservices.

Anypoint Service Mesh: extending an API-led approach to microservices architectures

Organizations can only realize the benefits of a microservices architecture by eliminating the custom code and complexity that comes from managing all of these disparate services. Developers also need to be able to find and reuse microservices created by other teams – breaking down these silos unlocks the true promise of speed, agility, and flexibility from microservices. 

As applications are increasingly distributed and containerized, a service mesh is a critical piece of a microservices infrastructure, increasing application resiliency and security. However, a service mesh does not solve all challenges in the microservices lifecycle on its own. Organizations still need a way to easily publish and reuse microservices across teams. Furthermore, a service mesh only provides these benefits to the set of microservices within a specific deployment. Organizations need a way to centrally view and govern all their services, regardless of the language or deployment model.

MuleSoft helps organizations gain the maximum value from this architecture by bringing API-led connectivity to microservices. An API-led approach enables organizations to unlock the value of their existing services with APIs and innovate rapidly while maintaining security and control of critical enterprise data or processes. It provides the blueprint for delivering an agile operating model and building organization-wide reuse and discovery through an application network. It fundamentally increases speed and agility for companies to deliver new competitive advantages. When this approach is applied consistently across a distributed microservices architecture, organizations can accelerate innovation by fully unlocking the value of any microservices-based application.

By extending Anypoint Platform to any microservice with Istio, a leading open-source service mesh framework, Anypoint Service Mesh brings the tenets of discoverability, management and security to microservices by making them pluggable into an application network. Through Anypoint Platform's single control plane, customers can now: 

·  Discover what microservices are available and how they work together

·  Visualize microservice dependencies using the application network graph

·  Maximize adoption and reuse by adding microservices to Anypoint Exchange

·  Centrally manage and scale microservice architectures

·  Ensure resiliency across services with Istio traffic control policies

·  Measure and optimize performance across all microservices with API analytics

·  Enable security by default

·  Implement mutual TLS for all traffic with Istio and Envoy policies to build a zero-trust network

·  Automatically enforce access controls on microservices exposed outside the service mesh

Comments on the news

"Our customer expectations are quickly evolving, so IQVIA Technologies uses microservices to increase our speed and agility for better customer experience. As part of the IQVIA application network and with MuleSoft's latest release, our microservices increase developer productivity to bring the most cutting-edge solutions to the market faster," said Tal Rosenberg, senior vice president of Global Technology Solutions, IQVIA.

"Many companies are jumping into microservice-based architectures at full cloud speed, however, there is not nearly enough thought, debate and action being taken to ensure their microservices don't become tomorrow's point-to-point code in the cloud. Service mesh will be an important part of how we help companies build for the future. As part of our alliance with MuleSoft, we are helping our joint customers to be nimble in response to customer demands and make the right people, process, and technology choices on their digital transformation journey," said Chris Purpura, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

"Microservices exhibit many of the same patterns as we see in the application network. When we extend the application network to include microservices, we are making these services easily discoverable and reusable. Developers now have the freedom to build great applications while IT maintains security and control. With this release, we continue to extend our vision for the application network, empowering companies to get a unified view of their services across the entire enterprise," said Mark Dao, chief product officer, MuleSoft.