Tag: Integration

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Retail 2023: The new Trend

From the last few years COVID pandemic has changed the whole Retail business spectrum in ways we could have never imagined before. Exploring new and accelerated trends gives us an indication of how this evolution will continue into the new normal. This pandemic also leads to closure of countless stores and bankruptcy. After surviving from the pandemic, inflation is hard hitting Retail business. Supply chain is also getting impacted with the Russia-Ukraine war. Now experts are saying that the greatest risk facing global supply chains has shifted from the pandemic to the Russia-Ukraine military conflict and the geopolitical and economic uncertainties.

With all this news for Retail industries, customer expectations and habits have shifted. Customers expect engagement on values to go beyond point of purchase to creating moments of engagement across the full journey. Now retailers have been compelled to find new ways to connect with consumers in a personalized and tailored way in-store as well as online to make a more intuitive experience. Retailers are going more digitized in their approach to connect with customers.

This is how retailers are moving forward to reach a wider customer base and lure their product. 

  1. e-commerce Technologies – In pandemic time if your business presence was not online then you will be out of business quickly. So Retailers have increased investment in e-commerce technologies. They increased the budget for digital transformation. To get ahead of competition, they are offering a mix of digital and physical experiences ahead of their rivals. Retailers are also focusing on customer service and providing seamless service experience across messaging, web and mobile channels. Retailers are creating a cohesive and connected customer shopping journey with e-commerce and unified data across systems.
  1. Infrastructure– Retailers are upgrading their instore as well as online infrastructure. They are replacing traditional store signs with digital signs and screens to display ads and videos. They are also adding kiosks and self-checkouts within the store. This is making the shopping experience more convenient and personalized. Shoppers are in and out, without having to make small talk or wait in queues. Deployment of in-store technologies double in a year.
  1. API-first and Cloud – Retailers are focused on Composable architecture. Composable architectures are key players to  implement successful digital transformations and most engaging digital experiences. 2023 will be a year of focus for retailers to remove entirely their legacy monolithic architectures. API-first and Cloud based solutions help retailers to switch to new functionality without the need for significant investment and resources. This will reduce the incredible amount of time and cost of ownership of a fraction of legacy technologies. API-first connectivity helps customers to shop anytime, anywhere and anyhow. 
  1. Customer experience – Customer experience is the one the main focus for Retailers this year. The focus of customer experience is online as well as in store experience. Retailers are providing customers enhanced assisted-selling experiences through assisted Selling. They are also focusing online customers through distributed OMS (Order Management System), Omni-channel and remote Selling. Retails are preparing for next level customer experience through loyalty(customers long-term relationships), native App and AI based digital fitting room.
  1. Merchandising & Supply Chain – Retailers are providing real time tracking and inventory information to their customers. They are also providing purchase incentives to their loyal customers so that they can keep engaging customers for their products. Retailers are also focusing on upgradation of warehouse management (WMS) to fulfill in-store as well as online orders.
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ChatGPT: A Intro & Company Use-Case

The internet is full of buzz about the new AI based chatbot, chatGPT. ChatGPT reminds me of the early days of  google, how google came and changed our internet search forever. We were using lycos search engine but google gave a new definition of search engine. Similarly I am seeing chatGPT is trying to define our search which is based on AI and AI models. It is coming as a new disruptive technology. Suddenly google is looking like old school.

Generative Pretrained Transformer 3 (GPT-3)  from OpenAI, is the main component for Jasper.ai and other cloud based content writing, chatbot and machine learning applications. GPT-3 was first publicly released by OpenAI on June 11, 2020.  GPT-3 is based on the concept of natural language processing (NLP) tasks and “generative pretraining”, which involves predicting the next token in a context of up to 2,048 tokens. 

GPT-3 is based on Large language models (LLMs). Large language models (LLMs) are AI tools that can read, summarize, and translate text. They can predict words and craft sentences that reflect how humans write and speak.Three popular and powerful large language models include Microsoft ’s Turing NLG, DeepMind’s Gopher, and OpenAI ’s GPT-3.

ChatGPT was first publicly released by OpenAI on November 30, 2022 based on the GPT-3 framework. Initially developed as part of the GPT-3 research program, ChatGPT was built on top of the powerful GPT-3.5 language model to specifically address natural language processing tasks that involve customer service chat interactions.

OpenAI’s Chat GPT3 has demonstrated the capability of performing professional tasks such as writing software code and preparing legal documents. It has also shown a remarkable ability to automate some of the skills of highly compensated knowledge workers in general. ChatGPT has immense potential for ecommerce customer experience automation. ChatGPT allows customers to personalized shopping and fully automated 24 x 7 customer service on-demand.

In spite of chatGPT buzzwords, ability to content writing and customer service on-demand, I am little careful to use this technology for my business. I tested a few use-cases in chatGPT. It is working fine with some simple use-case and problem solving. But as soon as I added a few more variables to my problem, the chatGPT response was not correct.

Here is screenshot from ChatGPT for my problem and solution from chatGPT

The problem shown above chatGPT directly calculated from equation and response came as 5 min.

In chatGPT’s response it is not calculating a person’s waiting time in the queue. 

So from above question right answer would be

Average Waiting Time = Average Processing Time x Utilization / (1-Utilization).

Average Waiting Time = 5 x (5/6) / (1 – 5/6) = 25 minutes

So, the correct answer is 25 minutes waiting in line. If we add the 5 minutes at the kiosk, we obtain a total of 30 minutes.

So from the above issue, I would like to highlight a few points if your company is trying to implement any ChatGPT solution.

  1. Does the ChatGPT AI model is configured based on your company use case?
  2. Do you have enough historical data to run and test AI based chatGPT LLM models?
  3. ChatGPT runs on the big model like LLM model. Big models incur a big cost, and LLM are expensive.
  4. Since ChatGPT runs on a big model (LLM), ChatGPT  needs to overcome performance constraints.

Keep an eye out for GPT-4, which may be released as early as the first half of 2023. This next generation of GPT may be better at their results and more realistic. 

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Recession: Impact in Software as a Service(SaaS) 

Global uncertainties continue to dominate headlines. Inflation is expected to reach the highest levels of ~3.5% in the US and Europe by the end of 2023. To ease inflation, Central Banks need to dampen demand, by making it expensive (for financial institutions, businesses and households) to borrow by increasing Federal Reserve interest rates . We are expecting a federal rate hike of 4.75% – 5.0% by the end of 2023. These are all data showing we are heading toward recession. The US labor market was robust last quarter but this quarter it is not very promising. Everyday we are hearing layoff news from different sectors.

IMF inflation forecast

These inflation and layoff news are impacting our tech market. Many companies have a growth challenge: They expect to get as much as 50 percent of their revenue from new businesses and products by 2026 but are not on a path that will take them there. Current economic conditions are forcing high-growth yet unprofitable tech startups to tighten their financial belts.

There are few realities, software companies are facing for their growth.

US-based Venture capitalists backed software startups slowed down – VC are very clear of high valuation and demanding that companies spend less, improve profit margin and high output. Unicorn creation also slowed in 2022 Q4. This is one of the lowest quarterly count since the first quarter of 2020.

Depressed company valuations – Private company valuations are cooling down. Over the last 4 quarters, we have seen public valuations compressing.

 Software companies have three critical revenue streams.

  1. License / Subscription Revenue – When the customer pays for the right to own and use a copy of the software/hardware product or subscribe/access  software platform
  2. software or hardware product – Customer pays for ongoing support or premium support.
  3. Cloud based licensed software – Customer pays the software provider for specific deliverables such as software implementation or technical training.

In the current world all these 3 revenue streams are shrinking. Companies are using only essential services to run their business. This is directly impacting software revenue, which is leading these companies into low valuation.

Infrastructure Maintenance –  SaaS companies are providing the software as a service. This means the customer does not have to purchase hardware to run the software—that cost is transferred to the SaaS provider. This is implying continuous software running coast. This cost is not going anywhere.So due to inflation this SaaS running cost increases tremendously.

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Recession: Industry Impact

Recession prospect is certainly very scary. World over economies are contracting. The recession has had a significant impact on the global economy, leading to decreased GDP growth and an uncertain future for many industries. The IMF cut its forecast of global GDP for the year to 2.7% and for the US GDP growth forecast is 1.4% .China and India are key players for the world’s supply-chain requirement. Post COVID pandemic China is still struggling to provide supply-chain needs to the world and India is still in process to build supply-chain needs. Escalating Russia-Ukraine war and geopolitical tension is disrupting the world’s supply-chain. 

Due to all these issues,Inflation is very high across the world. The inflation rate depends on the balance between aggregate supply and aggregate demand within the economy. US inflation consumer prices rose 7% approx. in December 2022 from a year ago. Inflation driving up vendor price beyond budget expectation. The US Federal Reserve is increasing interest rates in the most aggressive way to curb this inflation. 

No industry is completely insulated from a recession, there are always opportunities within even the most impacted industries. The Impact of recession  is not equal for all kinds of industries. Most impacted industries are directly proportional to consumer sentiment, consumer basic requirement and consumer spending. Least impacted industries are not directly proportion to user sentiment and it is also supported by external system.

Here is worldwide recession industry impact index

In the above chart, most impact industries are consumer, consumer services and transportation. After COVID-19 this industry is cautiously optimistic about the return of travel and tourism. But  inflation and a volatile market are pulling these industries down. Loyalty programs are weakening between brand and customer. Recession industry impact index is average 8.5/10 approx. Hospitality and Airlines industries are trying to optimize their process to mitigate their risk. They are cutting routes, reducing flights, and, in some cases, shutting down offices to help reduce expenditures.

Retail and Manufacturing industries and also getting impacted with current inflation and escalating geopolitical tension. Clearly the industry has experienced unprecedented supply chain pressures and disruptions over the past two years; Global disruptions – such as the Russia / Ukraine war – continue to impact manufacturing supply chains, thereby increasing costs and delays. Recession industry impact index for this industry is 7.5/10 approx. Retail and Manufacturing industries are working on omni-channel commerce platforms, optimized operations, and omni-channel order orchestration and fulfillment to mitigate their risk. They are reducing overhead cost and going for digital.

The Federal/Central Government is the most recession proof industry. It needs to make ongoing investment to keep the country running. Critical infrastructure management, border, customs and immigration management are key activities the government can not ignore and reduce investment. Even in COVID-19 pandemic time influx of federal funding and ample emergency funds put state and local entities in recession-ready shape. Recession industry impact index for this industry is 1/10 approx.

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API Security

API is a key component of digital transformation. API is the interface of your legacy and SAAS data. The goal of APIs is to facilitate the transfer and enablement  of data between your system and external users. APIs are typically available through public networks like the internet to communicate to external users and expose your data into the public domain.

Since your data is exposed into the public domain through APIs, It can lead to a data breach. APIs can be broken and expose sensitive personal as well as company data. An insecure API can be an easy target for hackers to gain access to your system and network. Rise of IOT devices and usage of APIs by these IOT devices, APIs are now more vulnerable. 

According to owasp, these are 10 main API vulnerabilities.

  1. Broken Object Level Authorization – Expose endpoints that handle object identifiers, creating a wide attack surface Level Access Control issue.
  2. Broken User Authentication – Authentication mechanisms are implemented incorrectly.
  3. Excessive Data Exposure – Developers  expose all object properties without considering their individual sensitivity
  4. Lack of Resources & Rate Limiting – APIs do not impose any restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be requested by the client/user, lead to Denial of Service (DoS) attack on APIs
  5. Broken Function Level Authorization – Complex access control policies with different hierarchies lead to authorization flaws.
  6. Mass Assignment – Without proper properties filtering based on an allowlist, usually leads to Mass Assignment.
  7. Security Misconfiguration – Misconfiguration or lack of Security configuration  is commonly a result of insecure APIs
  8. SQL Injection – SQL Injection occurs when untrusted data is sent to an interpreter as part of a command or query.
  9. Improper Assets Management – APIs tend to expose more endpoints than traditional web applications lead to improper expose APIs.
  10. Insufficient Logging & Monitoring – Insufficient logging and monitoring fail to find your vulnerability and broken integration.

How to mitigate API security risk?

  • API supports secure sockets layer (SSL), transport layer security (TLS), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) protocols, which provide security by encrypting data during the transfer process.
  • Apply Basic Auth minimum with API or  if you want to more secure your API then enable 2 way authentication through OAuth framework . 
  • Apply Authorization on each API resource to more control on API security through external Identity and access management provider (IAM).
  • Use encryption and signatures to all your API exposed personal and organizational sensitive data.
  • Apply API throttling through API manager to control number of user access per API (Rate Limiting).
  • Implement best practice of exception handling on your APIs to hide all your internal server and database information to mitigate SQL injection security risk.
  • Use Service Mesh to manage different layers of API management and control.
  • Audit your APIs and remove all unused API from your API catalog.
  • Add proper logging, Monitoring and Alerting on your APIs to keep track of your APIs activity.

Conclusion: APIs are a critical part of modern AI, mobile, SaaS, IOT and web applications. APIs Security should be the main focus on strategies and solutions to mitigate the unique vulnerabilities and security risks .

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Mulesoft Performance Tunning

API Performance Tunning
  1. Keep the application synchronous if possible. Synchronous flows avoid serialization/deserialization of messages sent through VM queues, do not cause context switches, and do not cause contention when messages move across thread pools.
  1. Store as little as possible in variables. The vars are serialized and deserialized every time a message crosses an endpoint, even if it is a VM endpoint. This will impact performance overhead in direct proportion to the size of variables and the number of endpoints. 
  1. Use Dataweave Java payloads whenever possible. The usage of a canonical data model is recommended for projects that deal with data (mapping, transformation etc.). It is also recommended to create them in Java objects as dataweave whenever possible, as this provides the fastest format to access fields and change information and to convert to other formats.
  1. Encourage dataweave  languages. For better performance, use Dataweave for simple data extraction from messages, and Java components with dataweave for everything else. 
  1. Use flow references instead of VM endpoints. To communicate between flows internally within an application, use flow references instead of VM endpoints. The VM connector, even though it is an in-memory protocol, emulates transport semantics that serialize and deserialize parts of your messages, most notably the vars. This makes it slower than a flow reference, which just injects messages into the referenced flow with no intermediate steps. Please note that in some cases the usage of VM endpoints is preferred (see the chapter on reliability patterns). For example, a Mule cluster can load balance applications that use VM endpoints by deferring execution to another, available node in the cluster.
  1. Cache aggressively. Take advantage of Mule’s caching scope when making requests to external resources like Web services or databases. Also consider caching reusable assets such as security tokens or ephemeral API keys and cookies. Mule’s Notification subsystem can additionally be used to “warm up” a cache when Mule starts. For example, consider doing this for situations where an initial cache miss is not acceptable.
  1. Configure message processors and endpoints at the global level. Some connectors allow you to configure some parameters at both the global and the endpoint/message processor level. We recommend placing the configuration at a global level to avoid repeated initialization of resources. 
  1. Avoid creating a large volume of business events. Business events incur performance overhead in Mule and in platform when platform’s internal event buffer overflows. Thus, avoid using either default flow level business events or a large volume of custom business events in a high message volume project.
  1. Consider using message compression. For communicating between Mule applications over the network consider using Mule’s compression processors to compress/decompress the message payloads before they hit the wire if their sizes are large.
  1. Consider using VM queues instead of an external message broker. VM queues are fast and have some guaranteed delivery semantics in a cluster. Consider using these instead of going out to an external messaging broker for inter-application Mule communication.
  1. Use the async scope when appropriate. If a flow is performing processing on a message that is neither modifying the message nor changing how it is routed, then it could be wrapped in an async block. This will cause the processing to occur in a different thread and will avoid adding unnecessary overhead to processing the message.
  2. Use connection pooling for connectors because the performance cost of establishing a connection to another data source, such as a database, is relatively high.
  3. Optimize your logging within your mule flows. Too much logging will slow down your process and too less logging will hard to debug.
  4. Encryption and decryption of data is very costly. Whenever your Mule application really needs then apply encryption/decryption on your data.

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APIs Integration with IOT and CRM improves Customer Service

APIs integration helping IOT and CRM to enable better customer experience

IOT (Internet of things) is revolutionizing our lives. As per Gartner report by 2025 IOT market will expand a 58-billion-dollar opportunity. It is affecting all parts of our life. In our pandemic era we found more use of IOT device to maintain social distancing.

IOT is also one of the main disruptive technologies in our businesses. It is affecting all business domain including healthcare, retail, automotive, security.

There are wide range of IOT benefits in business.

  • Enhanced productivity
  • Better customer experience
  • Cost-effectiveness

CRM system is keeping all your customer relationship like data, notes, metrics and more – in one place. CRM is helping small business to take off all burden from the IT management team by automating the business process. It is also helping employee to keep the focus on the critical business areas.

API is helping to integrate these two unrelated systems. APIs are enabling this system to optimize process and streamline whole business process. API is the main communication channel to build robust process and keeping real time update to these systems. APIs are allowing to build context-based application with IOT and CRM to interact with the physical world.

Now here are few areas where IOT is helping CRM system with help of APIs to optimize business process.

  1. Optimize customer service – Before your customer finds any error in your service/product you proactively acting on error and fixing those error. This will help to build relationship with customer.
  2. Increase sales – With help of IOT and CRM system you are finding untouched opportunity and using those opportunity to increase your sale.
  3. Personalize customer experience – You are analyzing data provided by IOT and CRM system and building user based predictive model to enable personalize experience to user.
  4. Customer retention – CRM provide customer data and relationship. IOT data providing customer behavior. This will help any business to personalize and target marketing for their customer.
  5. Omnichannel instore experience – IOT and CRM is helping business to enable 360 omnichannel customer experience. This process will help and suggest the products which the customer might purchase.

APIs  integration with IOT and CRM helping business to enable higher degree of personalization, target marketing, optimize price model, higher revenue and enhance customer satisfaction.

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Mule 4: Consume a SOAP Webservice

The Web Service Consumer is an existing connector in Mule 4 that you can configure to point to a SOAP based web service. Webservice consumer call webservice hosted elsewhere as WSDL SOAP services and get response. This connector simplified process and encapsulated all the feature to consume SOAP based webservice. When no connector is available specific to any product (like Service-Now, Workday etc.), which is hosted as SOAP based webservice then this webservice consumer Connector enables any services to consume.

The main feature of this connector is

  • Consuming DOC Literal Web services.
  • SOAP multipart messages.
  • SOAP Headers.
  • DataSense support for SOAP Headers, SOAP Body, and Attachment.
  • Embedded DataWeave transformations inside the operation.
  • Support and Unified experience for SOAP with attachments and MTOM handling.
  • Custom HTTP configuration as transport (runtime and design time).
  • Web Service Security (WS Security) support.

Connector Configuration- In this section we define connector configuration to communicate with SOAP based webservice end point. By default, connector uses a simple non protected HTTP configuration to send all outgoing SOAP message.  In connector configuration you can select your SOAP version from drop down  and provide WSDL location. Connector extract and populates Service, Port and webservice endpoint address from WSDL file.

But if you are using secure endpoint address with HTTPS you need to configure custom Transportation Configuration for HTTPS.

These are the steps to enable your secure HTTPS endpoint.

  • Create jks file with keytool command
 keytool -keystore clientkeystore.jks -genkey -alias client
  • Download certificate from WSDL HTTPS endpoint and add this certificate in your JKS file with below command
keytool -importcert -file certificate.cer -keystore clientkeystore.jks -alias "Alias"
  • Now configure TLS Context for Webservice consumer connector.
<tls:context name="TLS_Context" doc:name="TLS Context" doc:id="f634b824-2695-4d5f-8789-7a309b1511cb" >
           <tls:trust-store path="certificate/clientkeystore.jks" password="xxxxxx" type="jks" />
     </tls:context>
  • Now configure HTTP Request configuration for HTTPS endpoint.
<http:request-config name="HTTPS_Request_configuration" doc:name="HTTPS Request configuration" doc:id="02db1fd9-9f04-4eae-83cf-df43effd25d2">
           <http:request-connection protocol="HTTPS" host="service.vanrish.com" port="443" tlsContext="TLS_Context">
     	   </http:request-connection>
	</http:request-config>
  • If TLS and HTTPS configuration configured then you can select HTTP request configuration from Webservice consumer
<wsc:config name="BookService_Web_Service_Consumer_Config" doc:name="Book Web Service Consumer Config" doc:id="59fd0d73-f90d-4cf0-9855-c008307067a2" >
 <wsc:connection wsdlLocation="wsdl\bookservice.wsdl" service="BookService" port="BookServicePort" address="https://service.vanrish.com:443/service/BookService">
  <wsc:custom-transport-configuration >
    <wsc:http-transport-configuration requesterConfig="HTTPS_Request_configuration"/>
  </wsc:custom-transport-configuration>
 </wsc:connection>
</wsc:config>

Connector Parameter- If connector configuration is configured properly, your operation parameters are available from WSDL as drop down options.

In Message section there are three parameters available

  1. Body – The Body is main part of the SOAP message. The body element accepts embedded DataWeave scripts as values so that you can construct the XML request without having a side effect on the message or having to use multiple components to create the request.
  2. Headers – The headers element contains application-specific information (like authentication, payment, and so on) about the SOAP message . This elements accepts embedded DataWeave scripts as values.
  3. Attachment – The attachments element enables you to bind attachments to the SOAP message. This element also accepts embedded DataWeave scripts as values.

Since you configured custom HTTPS connector for your webservice consumer Connector you can configure Transport Configuration. In Transport header section you can select “Edit inline” and add all your header parameters in line

<wsc:consume doc:name="Consume" doc:id="ca5a1247-7cf6-4c7f-a442-b6fd037c13c9" config-ref="BookService_Web_Service_Consumer_Config" operation="AddBook">
       <wsc:transport-headers >
          <wsc:transport-header key="SOAPAction" value="AddBook" />
          <wsc:transport-header key="Content-Type" value="text/xml; charset=UTF-8" />
          <wsc:transport-header key="Authorization" value="${book.authorization}" />
       </wsc:transport-headers>
 </wsc:consume>

Here is webservice consumer flow diagram

Code for this flow

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<mule xmlns:ee="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/ee/core"
	xmlns:http="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/http" xmlns:tls="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/tls"
	xmlns:wsc="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/wsc"
	xmlns="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/core" xmlns:doc="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/documentation" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="
http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/ee/core http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/ee/core/current/mule-ee.xsd http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/core http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/core/current/mule.xsd
http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/wsc http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/wsc/current/mule-wsc.xsd
http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/tls http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/tls/current/mule-tls.xsd
http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/http http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/http/current/mule-http.xsd">
	
	<wsc:config name="BookService_Web_Service_Consumer_Config" doc:name="Book Web Service Consumer Config" doc:id="59fd0d73-f90d-4cf0-9855-c008307067a2" >
            <wsc:connection wsdlLocation="wsdl\bookservice.wsdl" service="BookService" port="BookServicePort" address="https://service.vanrish.com:443/service/BookService">
	            <wsc:custom-transport-configuration >
					<wsc:http-transport-configuration requesterConfig="HTTPS_Request_configuration" />
				</wsc:custom-transport-configuration>
            </wsc:connection>
     </wsc:config>

	<tls:context name="TLS_Context" doc:name="TLS Context" doc:id="f634b824-2695-4d5f-8789-7a309b1511cb" >
           <tls:trust-store path="certificate/clientkeystore.jks" password="changeit" type="jks" />
     </tls:context>

    <http:request-config name="HTTPS_Request_configuration" doc:name="HTTPS Request configuration" doc:id="02db1fd9-9f04-4eae-83cf-df43effd25d2">
           <http:request-connection protocol="HTTPS" host="service.vanrish.com" port="443" tlsContext="TLS_Context">
     	   </http:request-connection>
	</http:request-config>

	<sub-flow name="addbook-ServiceSub_Flow" doc:id="511f0969-0b7d-4b7e-a113-60ef03e97648" >
             <logger level="INFO" doc:name="Logger" doc:id="e6bd0106-e512-4fdd-97cf-1dbd77e1e0e7" message="Entering into AddBook flow"/>
                             <ee:transform doc:name="Transform Message" doc:id="06cc17de-86a9-4c53-a2f4-167d9561bed9" >
                                           <ee:message >
                                                          <ee:set-payload ><![CDATA[%dw 2.0
 output application/xml skipNullOn="everywhere"
 ns n0  https://www.service.vanrish.com/BookService/
  ---
   n0#AddBook:
         {
                 n0#Book : {
                 	ID: payload.id,
                 	Title : payload.title,
                 	Author : payload.author
                 }
         }]]></ee:set-payload>
                                           </ee:message>
                             </ee:transform>
                             <logger level="INFO" doc:name="Logger" doc:id="ce84f628-7b38-4d2d-b5e3-9fdded2c9289" message="soap request --> #[payload]"/>
                             
<wsc:consume doc:name="Consume" doc:id="ca5a1247-7cf6-4c7f-a442-b6fd037c13c9" config-ref="BookService_Web_Service_Consumer_Config" operation="AddBook">
                                           <wsc:transport-headers >
                                                          <wsc:transport-header key="SOAPAction" value="AddBook" />
                                                          <wsc:transport-header key="Content-Type" value="text/xml; charset=UTF-8" />
                                                          <wsc:transport-header key="Authorization" value="${book.authorization}" />
                                           </wsc:transport-headers>
                             </wsc:consume>
                             <logger level="INFO" doc:name="Logger" doc:id="680d69e0-2b01-480c-afe7-660ca22b2f9f" message="AddBook Output-->#[payload]"/>
                             <ee:transform doc:name="Transform Message" doc:id="72d26561-107a-4c6e-a7d4-85bd18e0d316" >
                                           <ee:message >
                                                          <ee:set-payload ><![CDATA[%dw 2.0
ns ns0 https://www.service.vanrish.com/BookService/
 

output application/json skipNullOn="everywhere"
---
payload.body.ns0#AddBookResponse]]></ee:set-payload>
                                           </ee:message>
                             </ee:transform>
                             <logger level="INFO" doc:name="Logger" doc:id="ea517185-efa4-4bf2-a03f-e8bd4d308e80" message="Output AddBook --> #[payload]"/>
              </sub-flow>
</mule>
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Mulesoft: FedRamp Compliance Cloud Integration for Government

Fiscal year 2019, government estimated $45.8 billion on IT investments at major civilian agencies, which will be used to acquire, develop, and implement modern technologies.78% of this budget goes to maintain existing IT system. In a constantly changing IT landscape, the migration of federal on-premise technologies to the cloud is increasing every year. Federal agencies have the opportunity to save money and time by adopting innovative cloud services to meet their critical mission needs and keep up to date with current technology. Federal agencies are required by law to protect any federal information that is collected, maintained, processed, disseminated, or disposed of by cloud service offerings, in accordance with FedRAMP requirements.

What is Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRamp) ? 

FedRamp is a US government-wide program that delivers a standard approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. The stakeholders for FedRamps are 

  1. Federal Agencies
  2. FedRamp PMO & JAB(Joint Authorization Board)
  3. Third Party Assessment Organization

FedRamp Process — There are 3 ways a cloud service can be proposed for FedRamp Authorization.

  1. Cloud BPA — Cloud Services through FCCI BPAs
  2. Government Cloud Systems — Services must be intended for use by multiple government or government approved agencies.
  3. Agency Sponsorship — This is the most popular route for cloud service providers (CSPs) to take when working toward a FedRAMP Authorization. CSP to establish a partnership with an Agency and agree to work together for an Authority to Operate(ATO).

Mulesoft FedRAMP Authorize Integration Platform

Mulesoft recently announced, FedRAMP process implementation of Anypoint Platform. MuleSoft is one of the first integration platform companies with FedRamp authorization and enabling both on-premises and cloud integration in the federal government and state government. Enablement of FedRamp of Mulesoft Anypoint platform, government IT teams can leverage the same core Anypoint Platform benefits in the cloud to accelerate their project delivery via reusable APIs.Anypoint Platform allows all government integration assets to be managed and monitored from a single, secure, cloud based management console, simplifying operations and increasing IT agility. 

Mulesoft Anypoint platform enables FedRamp-compliant iPAAS for government organization. Government IT integration project deploy in Anypoint platform within Mulesoft Government cloud 

  1. Accelerate government IT project deliveries by deploying sophisticated cross-cloud integration applications and create new APIs on top of existing data sources
  2. Project deliveries improve efficiencies at lower cost by allowing IT integration teams to focus on designing, deploying, and managing integrations in the cloud and allowing agencies to only pay for what they use, .
  3. Reduce risk of your IT project integration and increase application reliability by using of self-healing mechanism to recover from problems and load balancing.  

What is Mulesoft Government Cloud?

Mulesoft government cloud is a FedRamp-compliant, cloud based deployment environment for Anypoint platform. 

  1. It is built on AWS GovCloud with FedRamp control. 
  2. Mule Runtimes configured in secure mode to support the highest encryption standards and FIPS(Federal Information Processing Standard)  140-2 hardware and software encryption compliance.
  3. It is FedRamp-compliance at the moderate impact level.
  4. It is continuous 3rd party(3 POs) auditing and monitoring of security control.

Mulesoft government cloud can be access through this link https://gov.anypoint.mulesoft.com/login/ . Mulesoft Government cloud resources are available through Anypoint exchange. Mulesoft Government cloud exchange URL is https://gov.anypoint.mulesoft.com/exchange/ .

If you are accessing FedRamp-compliant Anypoint platform, after logging you get end user agreement as a consent. It is very typical for FedRamp-compliant government application.  

Conclusion — Executing any government or state project and working on different integration as well as API enablement, FedRamp-compliant Anypoint platform is one of the best options. It accelerate IT project deliveries, improve efficiencies and reduce IT risk .    

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Mule 4: APIKit for SOAP Webservice

Mule 4 introduced APIKit for soap webservice. It is very similar to APIKit for Rest. In SOAP APIKit, it accepts WSDL file instead of RAML file. APIKit for SOAP generates work flow from remote WSDL file or downloaded WSDL file in your system.

To create SOAP APIKit project, First create Mulesoft project with these steps in Anypoint studio.

Under File Menu -> select New -> Mule Project

Mule 4 Project Settings

In above pic WSDL file gets selected from local folder to create Mule Project.

Once you click finish, it generates default APIKit flow based on WSDL file.

In this Mulesoft SOAP APIKit example project, application is consuming SOAP webservice and exposing WSDL and enabling SOAP webservice.

Mule 4 API Kit for Soap Router

In SOAP Router APIKit, APIKit SOAP Configuration is defined WSDL location, Services and Port from WSDL file.

API Kit SOAP configuration

In above configuration, “soapkit-config” SOAP Router look up for requested method. Based on requested method it reroutes request from api-main flow to method flow. In this example, requested method is “ExecuteTransaction” from existing wsdl, so method flow name is

<flow name=“ExecuteTransaction:\soapkit-config”>  

In this example we are consuming same WSDL but end point is different.

To call same WSDL we have to format our request based on WSDL file. In dataweave, create request based on WSDL and sending request through HTTP connector.

Here is dataweave transformation to generate request for existing WSDL file

%dw 2.0
output application/xml
ns soap http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/
ns xsi http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance
ns ns0 http://localhost/Intellect/ExternalWebService
ns xsd http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema
ns ns1 xsd:string
---
 
{
  	soap#Envelope @('xmlns:xsi': 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'): {
  	 	
  	soap#Body: {
     	ExecuteTransaction @('xmlns': 'http://localhost/Intellect/ExternalWebService'): {
     	  Request @(xsi#'type': 'xsd:string'): payload.soap#Body.ns0#ExecuteTransaction.Request 
     	 
     	  }
     	
    	}
    	
  	}
}

Here is main flow

Main flow for API SOAP Kit

Here is full code

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<mule xmlns="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/core"
 xmlns:apikit-soap="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/apikit-soap"
 xmlns:doc="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/documentation"
 xmlns:ee="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/ee/core"
 xmlns:http="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/http"
 xmlns:wsc="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/wsc"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/core
 http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/core/current/mule.xsd
 http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/http
 http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/http/current/mule-http.xsd
 http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/apikit-soap
 http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/apikit-soap/current/mule-apikit-soap.xsd
 http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/wsc
 http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/wsc/current/mule-wsc.xsd
 http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/ee/core
 http://www.mulesoft.org/schema/mule/ee/core/current/mule-ee.xsd">
	<http:listener-config basePath="/fda" name="api-httpListenerConfig">
    	<http:listener-connection host="0.0.0.0" port="8081"/>
	</http:listener-config>
	<apikit-soap:config httpStatusVarName="httpStatus" name="soapkit-config" port="ISTCS2SubmitOrderSoap" service="ISTCS2SubmitOrder" wsdlLocation="ISTCOrder.wsdl"/>
	<wsc:config doc:id="b2979182-c4e9-489b-9420-b9320cfe9311" doc:name="Web Service Consumer Config" name="Web_Service_Consumer_Config">
    	<wsc:connection address="https://enterprisetest.vanrish.com/pub/xchange/request/atlas" port="ISTCS2SubmitOrderSoap" service="ISTCS2SubmitOrder" wsdlLocation="api/ISTCOrder.wsdl"/>
	</wsc:config>
	<http:request-config doc:id="408de2f8-c21a-42af-bfe7-2d7e25d153b0" doc:name="HTTP Request configuration" name="HTTP_Request_configuration">
    	<http:request-connection host="enterprisetest.fadv.com" port="443" protocol="HTTPS"/>
	</http:request-config>
	<flow name="api-main">
    	<http:listener config-ref="api-httpListenerConfig" path="/ISTCS2SubmitOrder/ISTCS2SubmitOrderSoap">
        	<http:response statusCode="#[attributes.protocolHeaders.httpStatus default 200]"/>
        	<http:error-response statusCode="#[attributes.protocolHeaders.httpStatus default 500]">
            	<http:body><![CDATA[#[payload]]]></http:body>
        	</http:error-response>
    	</http:listener>
    	<apikit-soap:router config-ref="soapkit-config">
        	<apikit-soap:attributes><![CDATA[#[%dw 2.0
          	output application/java
          	---
          	{
              	headers: attributes.headers,
              	method: attributes.method,
                  queryString: attributes.queryString
        	}]]]></apikit-soap:attributes>
    	</apikit-soap:router>
	</flow>
	<flow name="ExecuteTransaction:\soapkit-config">
    	<logger doc:id="62a3748e-b81c-4a95-9af0-99c5a282b237" doc:name="Logger" level="INFO" message="Entering into flow"/>
    	<ee:transform doc:id="c130d7ff-bd70-4af0-b7d4-9a6caa0d771f">
        	<ee:message>
            	<ee:set-payload><![CDATA[%dw 2.0
output application/xml
ns soap http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/
ns xsi http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance
ns ns0 http://localhost/Intellect/ExternalWebService
ns xsd http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema
ns ns1 xsd:string
---
 
{
  	soap#Envelope @('xmlns:xsi': 'http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'): {
  	 	
  	soap#Body: {
     	ExecuteTransaction @('xmlns': 'http://localhost/Intellect/ExternalWebService'): {
     	  Request @(xsi#'type': 'xsd:string'): payload.soap#Body.ns0#ExecuteTransaction.Request 
     	 
     	  }
     	
    	}
    	
  	}
}
 
]]></ee:set-payload>
        	</ee:message>
    	</ee:transform>
    	<http:request config-ref="HTTP_Request_configuration" doc:id="6d7001f3-b90a-4ed8-96d2-d577329d21d5" doc:name="Request" method="POST" path="/pub/xchange/request/atlas"/>
    	<logger doc:id="a05e704f-e539-48f3-9556-fe66641e3f64" doc:name="Logger" level="INFO" message="#[payload]"/>
	</flow>
</mule>