The Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is considered to be the best software release technique for any DevOps team. This technique helps programmers to supply code modifications regularly without mistakes. Therefore, CI/CD pipeline development is considered essential to modern-day software program development through all MuleSoft API lifecycle stages, which includes design, development, testing, release, and operations.
Continuous Integration (CI)
Let us first understand the process of Continuous Integration. CI is a coding ideology that simplifies a development team’s ability to prepare, apply, and run quality control on a release. It ensures consistency in planning, testing, and release of applications through automation. Many applications today consist of custom code created through various tools and systems. CI offers comprehensive and early advantages, as it reduces error-prone deployment jobs and highlights the presence of software bugs.
Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment (CD)
Continuous Delivery (CD) is the second half of the CI/CD pipeline. CD is the automation of deploying applications and code fixes, general to various environments such as testing, staging, and production. Teams can establish and release on a day-to-day, per-hour, or regular release schedule basis. Mule deployments can be easily automated using CI/CD.
With Continuous Delivery elements of human intervention integrated into the process with manual approvals and gates between environments, this approach is preferred by most enterprises. Another approach is Continuous Deployment, which favors automatic releases to all environments if quality controls are met. This approach is typically used by mature product teams with extremely robust release pipelines.
By releasing development versions of applications along with well-rounded testing and monitoring instilled in their software development life cycle (SDLC) using CI/CD, companies can confidently test and release new features and versions of applications.
The application of CI/CD with MuleSoft
When CI/CD is deployed using MuleSoft, you can achieve high-quality releases that can be automated and installed quickly. Moreover, we can ensure end-to-end visibility, control of the pipeline, and manage the external systems and tools in the API landscape. Achieving CI/CD in MuleSoft can be completed by these three primary parts: first, automate the build, testing, and deployment of APIs, and then automate tests in a workflow pipeline.
Stage 1: Automation of building and deployment of Mule Apps
All the Mule APIs are Java applications that are Maven-based. With the Mule-Maven module, MuleSoft can successfully automate the build and deployment process to various environments, such as cloud-based, on-premises, and hybrid. To accomplish this, incorporate the Mule-Maven plugin in the pom.xml file and add the MuleSoft Nexus Enterprise Repository to the Maven settings (settings.xml).
Stage 2: Testing automation.
We can perform advanced testing for Mule flows and guarantee the expected degree of testing using MUnits. MUnit is a testing framework for Mule based on JUnit in Java. With MUnits, testing becomes automated and you can easily convert to a test-driven development cycle. It covers unit testing and additional configurations that cover various use cases for data integrity. Furthermore, MUnits provides a coverage report that incorporates all the flows that have been tested or might have been left out in testing the Mule application. Use this coverage to determine if the API is approved for further stages or requires more changes and additional test cases.
We can also use tools like Postman and Newman for integration and “smoke testing.” Postman is an application used for API testing that helps create collections of integration tests and stores information for various test cases in different environments using different data. Newman is a CLI (command-line interface) tool that runs a Postman collection directly from the command line. Most build tools (like Jenkins) can run a collection of tests within the build job through Newman and receive immediate feedback. Smoke testing, which tests the main functionalities of an API, is automated by setting up Postman collections with the organization of environments, variables, and data for all essential test cases.
Stage 3: Workflow Pipeline Automation
The final part is to set up up a pipeline to automate the build, test, and delivery, and to organization of APIs using event-driven triggers. Various options are available in the market to create such pipelines for integration with MuleSoft, such as Git actions, Jenkins, and Azure DevOps.
Some of the tools that can be used in CI/CD to automate Mule deployments include GitHub for version control, Jenkins for dependencies management and build automation, MUnit for test automation, JIRA for concern and service management, and MS Teams, Slack and Outlook for collaboration. Puppet and Chef can be used to automate the setup and manage the Mule runtimes. Docker is also quickly gaining popularity as it reduces the intricacies of constant release, and the Mule runtime is quickly delivered in a Docker container. Moreover, using the Runtime Manager for Anypoint System APIs and Anypoint Platform CLI, processes can be automated with management and automation tools such as Chef, Ansible, and Salt instead of the Anypoint Studio user interface.
With the application of various automation tools, the implementation and orchestration of release procedures across various settings, such as development, testing, staging, and production, can be easily achieved for MuleSoft integrations. PreludeSys is an advanced MuleSoft partner, and we have helped enterprises develop a solid CI/CD pipeline for their workflow automation. Contact our experts to learn more about MuleSoft best practices. We will help you choose the right integration strategy for your enterprise.
