MuleSoft Meetup Valletta 1.0

Modern API's and their role in the integration of enterprise systems
23 May 2019
Valletta, Malta
#MuleSoftMeetup

All contents © MuleSoft Inc.
Welcome to the first MuleSoft Meetup in Malta
2
• Agenda
6:00 PM Registration and welcome drinks & snack
6:20 PM Software integration P2P vs ESB
6:40 PM The concept of modern API's
7:10 PM Air Malta Digital Transformation Story
7:30 PM Q&A
7:45 PM Beer, Pizza & Networking
• Speakers
– Ingram - Senior Integration Consultant & Developer, Ricston
– Justin - Integration Architect, Ricston
– Luke - IT Solutions Architect, Air Malta
• Partners & Sponsors
– MuleSoft, Ricston, Air Malta, Grand Central
• Meetup Leader
– Erika Quinn

© Ricston Ltd. 2019
Integration:
Point-to-Point and ESB
MuleSoft Inc.I https://www.mulesoft.com/
Ricston Ltd. | www.ricston.com | info@ricston.com
Air Malta I https://www.airmalta.com/
#MuleSoftMeetup

Why Integration?
● Enterprises nowadays have many applications
○ Built internally
○ Acquired from third parties
○ Legacy systems
○ Cloud based services
● The enterprise will have selected the best
package for a particular purpose
● Little thought given to how they will talk to one
another initially
● Eventually shared business transactions will
start to emerge
● Applications will need to talk to one another -
will need to be integrated

Sample Use Cases
● Information Portals
○ More than one system required to answer query
or perform business function
○ Need to aggregate information from multiple
systems into one view
● Data Replication
○ Need to ensure that two systems remain
synchronised with respect to their data
● Distributed Business Processes
○ A single business transaction may involve
steps affecting different systems
○ This transaction will have to be orchestrated by
some other agent
● Business to Business
○ Expose functionality to clients
○ Consume data from partners

Point-to-Point Integration
● Applications talking directly with one another
● Custom coding for each pair of applications
● Can become complex when multiple applications
are involved
● The technology may change with every application
and platform
● Tight coupling - replacing one application affects
all the others
● Code bloat - connection code within each
application
● No separation of concerns - application needs to
know details about the others

Point-to-Point Integration

ESB Integration
● Connect applications to a component called an
enterprise service bus (ESB)
● The ESB takes the responsibility of moving
messages from one application to the other

ESB Integration
● The integration logic is moved to the ESB - reducing code bloat
● Applications no longer need to know about one another - loose
coupling
● Applications need only know how to communicate with the ESB -
platform neutral
● The ESB will provide common functionality:
○ Routing - application does not need to know who the
target is
○ Transformation - application does not need to convert
data formats
○ Filtering - application does not need to perform validation
○ Support for asynchronous processing - source and target
do not need to be alive at the same time
○ Support for transactional processing - transactions
across different systems

Modern API’s and their role in the
integration of enterprise systems
#MuleSoftMeetup

● An API is an interface into a system
● Typically refers to an HTTP interface
○ Some interfaces accept ﬁles, messages over
queues, etc
● Should be intuitive to use, rich in content.
○ Ease of use leads to faster adoption and a better
user experience
○ Not an easy feat!
● Biggest challenge with APIs is to understand the business
processes and the technical limitations of the underlying
system
○ Collaboration with stakeholders is paramount!
● HTTP APIs been around for a while
○ Lately started to become more mainstream
■ Standards have evolved
■ Tooling has improved
■ Business has bought into the idea of an API
Introduction
API

Business Viability
● Can serve as a deﬁning factor when solutions are
selected.
○ Managed exposure of core system functionality
enables self-service options by consumers
● APIs are now considered as viable revenue streams
○ Treated as individual assets (or products) to
facilitate onboarding and long term relationships
between partners.
○ Same asset can serve many clients across
different permission tiers

Progress Over Time - Stateful APIs
● In the past, APIs allowed you to create and alter
resources by opening a session, executing the action
and then closing a session.
● Integrating with these APIs caused a lot of headaches
○ The underlying logic of the system oftentimes
permeated through the interface.
○ Business process logic often times was long and
unwieldy
■ How do we reuse process steps across
multiple business processes
○ Error handling became an issue.
■ Do we roll back fully? Partially?
■ How do we recover when the error
handling route fails?
■ How do we clean up the session?
Stateful
APIs

Progress Over Time - Stateless APIs
● Nowadays, APIs are mostly stateless.
● They expose resources and allow you to manipulate them
without worrying about previous actions (for the most part)
○ Requests are self contained
○ API implementation will validate the request,
business logic, etc
● Most abide by RESTful best practices
○ Implementing RPC-style POST requests is typically
not the best way of approaching an API
● Most APIs are now easy to use and their documentation is
suﬃcient for developers to self serve.
○ Often times generated from the API speciﬁcation
itself.
Stateless
APIs

API Tooling
● Standards and tooling has improved over time
○ RPC (bespoke standards)
○ SOAP (WSDL definitions)
○ REST (Swagger / RAML specifications)
● Contract-first development:
○ Facilitates early buy in from stakeholders using realistic mockups
○ Facilitates developers via automatic code generation based on the specification
■ Springmvc-raml-plugin (https://github.com/phoenixnap/springmvc-raml-plugin)
■ Swagger for REST APIs (https://swagger.io/tools/swagger-codegen/)
■ XJC for SOAP APIs (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/unix/xjc.html)
○ Is programming language agnostic
■ Implementation can be written in Java, Scala, .NET, Node, etc.
Development

API Tooling
● API Managers come with several features from the get go
○ Request tracing
○ Per-client request filtering and reporting
○ HTTP / API error rates
○ Rate limiting / Throttling
○ Reporting capabilities
● Integration with OpenID servers facilitates self serving and onboarding of new partners or clients.
○ API Managers typically come with security policies out of the box
■ Client ID / Client Secret
■ OAuth / OpenID flows
■ Mutual SSL authentication
● API Managers often come with their own APIs too!
○ Codified API configurations
○ Can be plugged into CI/CD pipelines
■ Ansible, Jenkins, TravisCI, bespoke devops scripts
Runtime

Beneﬁts of APIs
● Abstracts users from the complexities of the underlying
system/s
● APIs can stitch together several complicated business
processes
● They force you to think long term
○ An API without longevity is dead on arrival
● They act as solid foundations that can serve as building
blocks for other projects and other teams (internal or
external)
○ There is an element of reusability
○ Developers do not have to reinvent the wheel
○ API Led Connectivity
■ Applications and APIs across multiple tiers
with increased levels of abstraction.

MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform

© Air Malta 2019
Embarking on a Digital Transformation Journey
#MuleSoftMeetup

Air Malta - Challenges
● High competition - entry of low cost carriers and
relatively small ‘homebase’ for Air Malta
● Economies of scale are practically non-existent
● Eﬃciencies and Sustainability - cost cutting and
proﬁtability
● Legacy dependent - both internal and external
● Vendor driven - driven by large players
● Monolithic - lacking of integration prospects
© Air Malta 2019

IT’s role within Air Malta
© Air Malta 2019
Opening new
revenue streams
Operate more
efficiently
• Bringing services and information together
• Analyse and understand what a customer really wants
• Optimising without disruption
• New ways of applying technology
• Launch products to market quicker
• Increase distribution coverage
• Be one step ahead of what the business needs
Innovate customer &
employee experience

Achieving the Vision through API-led economy
© Air Malta 2019
Data Governance - Be
in control of data and
information
Visibility and reusability
Market options and
capability to shift
Explore new trends,
technologies and
frameworks
Robust, resilient and
adaptive
Maturity through
iteration
Provide means and
opportunities
Becoming core
Become as vendor
agnostic as possible

Use case (1)
© Air Malta 2019
TDB Processing into Salesforce
360 Customer View
Measurable Metrics & KPI’s
Holistic system
Data control

Use case (3)
© Air Malta 2019
Flight Operations Integration
Operation efficiency
Quality bookings
High availability
Reusability

Results
© Air Malta 2019
METRIC 3
95% code-reuse
METRIC 2
One-click
deployments
METRIC 1
Up to 5 times
faster
time-to-market
API MVP available for Salesforce integration
partner within 2 weeks down from 8 weeks
Flight Reservation API project completed in 8
weeks, instead of the estimated at 9 months
Flight Operations project complete in 6
months, instead of the estimated at 18
months

Results
© Air Malta 2019
METRIC 3
95% code-reuse
METRIC 2
One-click
deployments
METRIC 1
Up to 5 times
faster
time-to-market
Deployment range from two-nodes on
CloudHub to 8 hosts on premises
Codiﬁed deployments included are Mule
apps, reverse proxies, database schemas,
integration, load and end-to-end testing
Zero down-time deployments

Results
© Air Malta 2019
METRIC 1
Up to 5 times
faster
time-to-market
METRIC 2
One-click
deployments
METRIC 3
95% code-reuse
Heavy use of out-of-the box Mule connectors and
libraries
Custom logging connector re-used across
applications
Re-use of the system and process
APIs
Tried and tested, highly-available, low-latency,
99.99% up-time

Join the community and become a Muley!
#MuleSoftMeetup

MuleSoft Meetup Valletta 1.0

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