OpSource Powers “The Cloud” with MuleSoft
OpSource is focused on providing a complete Web operations infrastructure and service solution for the serious Software as a Service (SaaS) and Web business. Relying on OpSource’s process discipline and application management expertise frees customers to focus on building core business value.
“One of our primary reasons for choosing Mule was the ability to quickly modify the platform. Without that ability, we would never have been able to do what we have done, taking a single instance of Mule and making it available to hundreds of clients at once.”
John Rowell, Chief Technology Officer, OpSource
The Challenge – massive scale and disparate data silos
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Since the company’s founding in 2002, OpSource’s IT infrastructure had grown in leaps and bounds, without an overarching unified data model. As a result, OpSource was faced with many silos of data, in varying formats and locked in legacy applications that could not be replaced, each with its own set of tools to extract and analyze that data to make it useful. Because the data was tightly coupled to each provider’s data model, any system upgrade would represent a significant development effort and subsequent maintenance burden.
“When we started with this project, the problem of these disparate silos of data created a significant amount of fear in our organization,” said John Rowell, OpSource CTO. “However fear tends to create opportunities, and we saw an opportunity to leverage all of this valuable data and create additional services to better serve our customers.”
OpSource needed a way to integrate their disparate systems in a loosely coupled manner so that systems could be upgraded, or even replaced, with minimal impact. In addition, the team wanted to create a canonical data model – a single set of SQL and XML schemas and a single data format for the enterprise – enabling them to create an operational data store and an enterprise data warehouse. As a result, they would be able to expose this data to customers and end-users through an application interface, an off-the-shelf analytical platform, or through APIs.
In addition, OpSource needed a way to provide infrastructure services to their customers and end-users, including single sign-on and identity management for hundreds of OpSource customers that service millions of end-users. OpSource also needed to enable customers to post and retrieve data to and from their applications and databases. Finally, with this infrastructure OpSource wanted also to be able to offer its customers APIs for other end-user services such as billing and trouble ticketing.
The Solution – ESB and “in-the-cloud” integration
OpSource chose Mule ESB as the basis of its enterprise service bus (ESB) for integration and service oriented architecture (SOA), a fully asynchronous and highly configurable platform. With a design focused on reliability, availability, scalability and performance, the ESB currently handles over 250 million messages per day, with seven providers integrated on the system and five more on the near-term roadmap. The architecture is horizontally expandable with new instances of Mule as the implementation grows and as more systems are brought online.
The team is using adapters to bring together disparate application formats (e.g., IMAP, CSV, XML, LDAP, SQL) and transport protocols (e.g., SOAP, JMS, REST, SCP). A service orchestration and transformation layer integrates the various silos and transforms the data to a canonical model, persisting it in the data warehouse (currently at 40 million rows in scale).
OpSource implemented a federated single sign-on (SSO) and identity management service on this platform using CAS and Active Directory. Using Mule, the team built a composite application, called OpSource.net, that allows customers to access the exposed data in the form of analytics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for systems and application performance. Using this infrastructure, customers can also leverage OpSource’s billing and trouble ticketing services for their end-users.
Finally, Mule is enabling OpSource to drive significant innovation in the SaaS technology space. OpSource created a fully multi-tenant version of Mule, called OpSource Services Bus, to enable an in-the-cloud application peering point. With this service, OpSource publishes an application directory, allowing customers not only to integrate applications within the cloud, but also to enable cloud to behind-the-firewall integration as well. The platform is reliable and secure, complying with security and privacy standards such as PCI Level 1, SAS 70 Type II certifications, and EU Safe Harbor requirements.
Why MuleSoft
When selecting an ESB vendor, OpSource considered a wide range of open source and proprietary providers, looking for the software that best fit their business and that could enable OpSource to best serve their customers. The team selected MuleSoft, based on Mule’s technical capabilities (e.g., mediation, routing and transformation), as well as its support for standards such as JMS and SOAP. Mule’s strong support for the Spring framework also fit well with the team’s IT strategy.
Even more importantly, the OpSource team was impressed with the ability to leverage the benefits of open source, easily customizing Mule to fit their business requirements. This extensibility was critical in enabling new services such as the multi-tenant OpSource Services Bus.
“One of our primary reasons for choosing Mule was the ability to quickly modify the platform,” said Rowell. “Without that ability, we would never have been able to do what we have done, taking a single instance of Mule and making it available to hundreds of clients at once.”
As a MuleSoft customer, OpSource has benefited from MuleSoft’s strong technical support services on top of the open source communities.
