MuleSoft Anypoint Platform Tour
Anypoint Platform is MuleSoft's all-in-one cloud platform. You use it to design APIs, manage deployments, monitor running applications, and share reusable assets with your team. This tour walks through each section so you know where to go for each task.
Accessing Anypoint Platform
Open a browser and go to anypoint.mulesoft.com. Log in with your MuleSoft account. If you do not have an account, you can sign up for a free trial account at the same address. The trial gives you access to CloudHub, Anypoint Exchange, and other platform features for 30 days.
Anypoint Platform Navigation Map
anypoint.mulesoft.com | +-- Home (Dashboard) | +-- Design Center --> Design APIs and Flows | +-- Anypoint Exchange --> Find and Publish Reusable Assets | +-- Runtime Manager --> Deploy and Manage Applications | +-- API Manager --> Secure and Monitor APIs | +-- Anypoint Monitoring --> Dashboards, Logs, Alerts | +-- Access Management --> Users, Roles, Teams
Home Dashboard
The Home dashboard gives you a summary of your environment. You see the number of deployed applications, active APIs, and recent alerts. Business groups appear here too. A business group is a way to organize resources for different departments. The IT team might have one business group and the marketing team another.
Design Center
Design Center has two modes:
- API Designer: Create API specifications using RAML or OAS. Define endpoints, request formats, and response formats before writing any code. Teams use this to agree on the API contract first.
- Flow Designer: Build simple integration flows in the browser without installing Anypoint Studio. Good for quick prototypes or simple automations.
API Designer Workspace Layout
+------------------+------------------------------+-------------------+
| File Tree | RAML / OAS Editor | API Console |
| | | (Live Preview) |
| api.raml | #%RAML 1.0 | |
| /schemas | title: Orders API | GET /orders |
| /examples | version: v1 | POST /orders |
| | /orders: | GET /orders/{id} |
| | get: | |
| | description: List all | [Try It button] |
| | post: | |
| | description: Create one | |
+------------------+------------------------------+-------------------+
Anypoint Exchange
Anypoint Exchange is the asset library for your organization. It holds connectors, API specifications, API fragments, examples, and templates. When you need to connect to Salesforce, you search Exchange for the Salesforce Connector, read its documentation, and add it to your project directly from Studio.
Exchange has two sections:
- MuleSoft Certified: Assets built and tested by MuleSoft, like the Salesforce Connector, Database Connector, and HTTP Connector.
- Organization Assets: Assets your team published, like your company's custom connectors, standard error response templates, or reusable DataWeave libraries.
Runtime Manager
Runtime Manager is where you deploy and manage your Mule applications. After you build an application in Anypoint Studio, you deploy it here. Runtime Manager shows the status of every deployed application — running, stopped, or failed.
Runtime Manager Application Status Board
Application Name Status Workers Region
----------------------------------------------------------
order-api-v1 STARTED 1 vCore US East
customer-sync-job STARTED 2 vCores EU West
inventory-batch STOPPED -- US East
payment-gateway-api FAILED 1 vCore US East
[Alert: OutOfMemoryError]
When an application shows FAILED, you click on it to see the logs and find out what went wrong. You can restart applications directly from this screen.
API Manager
API Manager is where you control access to your APIs. You register an API, apply policies, and track which client applications are calling it. Common policies include:
- Client ID Enforcement: Only registered clients with a valid client ID can call the API.
- Rate Limiting: A client can make at most 100 requests per minute.
- OAuth 2.0: Clients must present a valid OAuth token to access the API.
- IP Allowlist: Only requests from specific IP addresses pass through.
API Manager Policy Stack Diagram
Client App
|
v
[API Gateway]
|
+-- Check Policy 1: Is Client ID valid? --> If No: 403 Forbidden
|
+-- Check Policy 2: Rate limit exceeded? --> If Yes: 429 Too Many Requests
|
+-- Check Policy 3: OAuth token valid? --> If No: 401 Unauthorized
|
v
[Your Mule Application] --> Processes request and returns response
Anypoint Monitoring
Anypoint Monitoring provides real-time and historical data about your applications. The key views are:
- Built-in Dashboards: Show request counts, response times, error rates, and CPU usage for each application automatically.
- Custom Dashboards: You build dashboards with the specific metrics your business cares about.
- Log Search: Search logs from all applications in one place. You can filter by application name, log level, or keywords.
- Alerts: Set thresholds. Get notified by email when error rates exceed 5% or response times exceed 2 seconds.
Access Management
Access Management controls who can do what on the platform. You create users, assign them to teams, and grant them roles. A developer role gives access to Design Center and Anypoint Studio deployments. An operations role gives access to Runtime Manager and Monitoring. An administrator role controls everything.
Access Management Role Matrix
Role | Design Center | Runtime Manager | API Manager | Exchange ------------------|---------------|-----------------|-------------|-------- Developer | Read + Write | Deploy Only | View | Read Operations | View | Full Control | View | Read API Manager Admin | View | View | Full Control| Read Org Admin | Full | Full | Full | Full
Environments in Anypoint Platform
Every organization in Anypoint Platform has multiple environments. By default, you get Development, Staging, and Production. Applications deployed to Development do not affect Production. API policies in Staging do not apply to Production. Each environment is isolated, so you test safely before releasing to production users.