MuleSoft has announced the open beta for AsyncAPI support in its Anypoint Platform. AsyncAPI is an open source software tool designed to enable developers to ‘describe’ event-driven software architectures i.e. ones that are capable of capturing, communicating and processing events between decoupled services for asynchronous applications. Mulesoft Anypoint Platform itself is a technology designed to develop and manage ‘simple-to-complex’ APIs and integrations at scale. The company says this new yoking across and into AsyncAPI will help facilitate the adoption of event-driven architectures (EDAs).
But event-driven methodologies and approaches have been around for many years and were lauded around the turn of the millennium as about to flourish, so why are EDAs so of-the-moment now?
MuleSoft says EDAs can unlock new AI use cases by bringing real-time communication to systems or processes that contain fluctuating data sets, such as predictive maintenance, dynamic pricing, or fraud detection. For example, banks can use AI models to analyse transactional data and user behaviour patterns to identify suspicious activities and trigger immediate responses such as transaction blocking or alerts to mitigate fraud risks.
Event brokers & message queues
Once again driving home the need for this AsyncAPI support in Anypoint, MuleSoft says that this development will help software teams to develop end-to-end integrations for event-driven applications, enabling systems to process and respond to real-time events efficiently. The new capabilities help bring real-time customer interactions across various applications and systems by simplifying the complexity of connecting with popular event brokers and message queues.
As clarified here by Red Hat, “Many modern application designs are event-driven, such as customer engagement frameworks that must utilise customer data in real time. Event-driven apps can be created in any programming language because event-driven is a programming approach, not a language. Event-driven architecture enables minimal coupling, which makes it a good option for modern, distributed application architectures.”
As an integration function with expanded capabilities, MuleSoft claims to be able to bring a diverse set of integration capabilities into a single platform, allowing software application developers to build APIs for a wide range of use cases, architectural patterns, or protocols — AsyncAPI, REST and GraphQL APIs.
Why event-driven matters
Looking more closely, let’s again question why this might matter. Because says MuleSoft (and according to Salesforce research), around two-thirds of consumers expect companies to respond and interact with them in real-time, so organisations must build faster communication methods between applications to meet this demand.
“Creating event-aware applications is essential to achieving this goal, however, traditional approaches to event-driven integration can be complex and time-consuming. By incorporating end-to-end event-driven integration capabilities into their integration platform, MuleSoft is helping organizations rapidly adopt event-driven architectures and deliver real-time customer experiences,” stated MuleSoft, in a technical product statement.
AsyncAPI support in Anypoint Platform allows businesses to take advantage of event-driven architectures and build end-to-end, event-driven integrations. The new capabilities helps support real-time customer experiences by extending existing architectures to popular event brokers and message queues, such as Kafka and MuleSoft’s own Anypoint MQ.
With AsyncAPI support, developers and API architects can design and govern AsyncAPI specifications using MuleSoft’s API design tooling (Anypoint Design Center) or IDEs (Anypoint Code Builder and Anypoint Studio) which simplifies conformance with the AsyncAPI standard and predefined best practices. They can also discover and reuse events across an organisation by publishing AsyncAPI specifications to MuleSoft’s public marketplace (Anypoint Exchange) for collaboration across the enterprise.
Maintenance, pricing & recommendations
“This innovation will open up new AI use cases to power customer experiences. Organizations can enable predictive maintenance across industrial applications by combining event-driven architectures with predictive AI models. For example, machines in the manufacturing process stream performance data to models that can predict when they require maintenance, preventing failure and extended downtime to make repairs,” explained MuleSoft.
Businesses can use this technology to employ AI models with an event-driven system to analyse market trends, competitor pricing and customer behaviour in real-time. For example, by streaming competitor pricing data and user behaviour to models, systems can dynamically adjust the price of a product or introduce new promotions to stay competitive in the market.
The company suggests that AI models can be integrated now into an event-driven architecture to create real-time product recommendations. As a working example, a consumer shopping for camping gear will see related products based on their most recent search history and broader purchase history across all customers, even people that they don’t know, but who have searched for similar products (or indeed services) with the same underlying intent and aims.
While this announcement represents one of MuleSoft’s bigger news alerts for this period, the wider moves to elevate event-driven architecture technologies into its platform are also evident. Given EDA’s complementary stance in relation to Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) adoption that so many software engineering teams will already be familiar with, its resurgence (or amplified popularisation) is perhaps well aligned with moves to deepen componentised microservices usage across cloud-native deployment. As for the poor old mule, let’s hope the hinny (the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse) is about to rise.
