Mule Deployment Models Which One to Go For

Being an Architect, Product owner or a CXO of your organization having already purchased a brand new anypoint platform subscription or planning to get one based on evaluation of the platform and now In dilemma which subscription model to go for ?

This article will help you to provide a 1000ft overview of various deployment options available in anypoint platform and which one to go for. 

To Start our journey, Mulesoft offers various deployment options, to name some-

• Cloudhub Deployment
• Bare Metal Installations
• Runtime Fabrics
• Private cloud Edition

That’s confusing right?

To help you guide through the process of choosing the best one for you here is little background on how the anypoint platform is divided, it will help you analyse and align with your requirements –

1. Runtime plane – This is the part of the platform where the application server/ mule runtime engine is physically hosted. This would contain your mule application packages, connectors etc.

Talking about deployment the runtime plane can be hosted –

• iPaaS – Cloudhub, Its mulesoft’s AWS Hosted, multi tenant managed solution for application deployment, it provides features such as 99.99% uptime, scalability, availability and relibility. Of course you wont have visibility on the VMs where your applications are actually hosted but in pretty much cases it will be secure. Also you would have flexibility of deploying your applications to specific regions e.g. UK, EU, US Etc to comply with the laws of your organization.

• Self Managed – If your organization is concerned about where physically your applications are hosted and have compliance laws govern the application interaction, then you should go for hosting your own mulesoft instances. There are a variety of options available to choose from-
  • Bare Metal Standalone on prem installation
  • Run time Fabric on prem/cloud
  • Standalone Installation on SaaS like AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud etc.
  • PCF

1. Control Plane – Its the part of platform where the actual brain/ control panel sits. Some of the tools available in runtime plane are Design center, runtime manager, anypoint monitoring, API manager and Administrator Control panel. Control plane can be hosted on below models –
   • US or EU Control Plane (multi-tenant) – all of the above application are hosted in the US or the EU region, be careful while choosing the control plane as your country GDPR laws might affect where you can store the data.
   • GOV Cloud
   • Private Cloud Edition –  This is basically single-tenant version of mulesoft which offers full control of your data within your own data centers. Using Private Cloud Edition,we would be able to maintain control over data storage and processing of data. The control plane appliance can be installed onto your own data centers, such as on-prem or Azure or AWS. Private Cloud Edition leverages Docker and Kubernetes technologies to provide built-in high availability and scalability.

Trade-off –

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