The IBM DataPower Gateway is a security and integration platform.
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Anypoint Platform
Score 8.1 out of 10
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The Anypoint Platform developed by MuleSoft and acquired by Salesforce in early 2018 is designed to
connect apps, data, and devices anywhere, on-premises or in the cloud. This platform was built to
offer out-of-the-box connectors as well as tools that architects and developers can adopt quickly to
design, build and manage the entire lifecycle of their APIs, applications, and products.
WebSphere DataPower Gateway is really beneficial if you are trying to integrate two or more systems. It provides you with comfort and peace of mind by creating a DMZ zone for the services which are going out of the intranet to hit external clients APIs. It is greatly recommended if you have a very high volume service or API which is being used by a majority of clients because it has a dedicated physical box present which takes care of memory, CPU and all such stuff. So, all your transactions happen at wire-speed.
MuleSoft Anypoint Platform is best tool in the market for developing APIs with complex structures communicating with various different types of applications including web applications as well as legacy applications. Also applications including database connectivity for fetching and updating data in the DB tables. I cant think of any scenario which MuleSoft Anypoint Platform could not be used for developing the integrations.
The most obvious thing that DataPower does exceptionally well is security. All the built-in supported security capabilities allow us to isolate most security tasks to DataPower and as a result "protect" down steam services/systems to have to deal with security.
DataPower is very good at protocol conversion and as it is usually used on the edge allows you to narrow down the protocols used between the companies public and private networks.
The appliance concept makes maintenance, recovery and, management so much simpler.
The old interface is being really missed by our team as the new WebUI interface is not that intuitive or easy to work with. It takes a lot of time to load. There should be an inbuilt wizard for creating a Rest service as well like there is for an XML based service.
IBM support is very knowledgeable but it's not that easy to reach them. They don't release the fix patches very soon which also becomes a big issue in certain situations where critical projects are involved.
Lastly, DataPower has its steep learning curve and it requires time and effort on your end to gain full control and make the most of the advanced features which it offers. Finding the right resource in the market is not that easy.
Has more features than what we really need so we're paying for more than we use. Sort of like paying for an Abrams tank when all we really need is a Toyota Corolla.
Not a value product, tends to be expensive.
Takes a while for developers to learn to use Mulesoft Anypoint.
Anypoint Platform support is very responsive. There is also a huge knowledge base and an active online forum where answers to most questions can be found. When needed support engages the engineering group so adequate solutions or workarounds are always provided.
Once we have moved all of our system integration APIs to the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, we will need to communicate with a wide variety of external systems. All of our business and service logic is stored in the aforementioned core systems. Anypoint Platform (and all of our APIs) makes it easy to connect to various other platforms. In order to link to these many other systems, connectors and/or components are utilized, and they are simple to configure and integrate.
It has really taken our business to the next level. We have expanded and integrated with so many new vendors and for all those integrations DataPower is serving as our security gateway.
We don't have to depend on any other tool for doing the load balancing of the incoming requests as that is also taken care inside the WebSphere DataPower Gateway box itself, thereby distributing the load equally.
It has made our platform much more secure, uniform and robust to deal with any kind of incoming message format or threat as well due to its latest security mechanisms and huge processing power.
