Comparing MuleSoft Anypoint MQ and Solace PubSub+ Event Broker; Pick the Right Tool for the Job

All products have strengths and weaknesses, and which is best for you depends on what you are trying to do. With this blog post, I’ll summarize the differences between Mulesoft Anypoint MQ and Solace PubSub+ Event broker.

• Mulesoft Anypoint MQ is a cloud-based message broker that lets applications asynchronously exchange data by publishing a Mule message to a queue where another app can consume it. While Anypoint MQ is an integrated part of Anypoint Platform, it does require a separate enterprise subscription.
• Solace PubSub+ Event Broker is a mature event broker that supports all message exchange patterns, qualities of service, and features like caching, partitioned queues distributed tracing, and replay. PubSub+ Event Broker is also an integral part of PubSub+ Platform – a full-featured event-driven integration and streaming platform that includes single pane of glass multi-cloud management; rich, detailed observability and alerting; and PubSub+ Event Portal which offers for self service access, governance and lifecycle management of events.

Comparison

To help you understand how the two products stack up and decide which offers the right features for your use case, I’ll compare the two brokers in six areas: connectivity, deployment options, distribution across environments, HA/DR, observability and routing via topics.

Connecting Diverse Applications

AnyPoint MQ uses REST APIs for connectivity, and you can use it with app frameworks like node.js to communicate with queues. This REST API is easy to use but does lock you into using it as the interface to your broker, unlike standards like JMS and AMQP. In addition, it limits the types of use cases, such as IoT connectivity via MQTT, for integration with Mulesoft.

In addition to REST and webhooks, PubSub+ Event Broker supports popular protocols like AMQP, Kafka, MQTT and WebSocket. Solace also offers client libraries for popular programming languages, and packaged connectors called micro-integrations for all kinds of applications, cloud services, and integration tools. Out of the box, PubSub+ Event Broker performs protocol mediation so producers and consumers can use different client libraries and protocols. Solace thereby enables real-time connectivity between any type of application, including with Mulesoft Integrations via the Solace PubSub+ Connector – Mule 4. In fact, Solace recently came out with the Solace Micro-Integration Generator for MuleSoft Anypoint Platform which makes developing event-driven integrations easy.

Deployment Options

As a fully-integrated element of Anypoint Platform, Anypoint MQ can be deployed in any of a dozen AWS regions, but does not support deployment in other public or private clouds, let alone on-premises environments like datacenters, co-location facilities, or IoT edge environments.

Solace PubSub+ Event Broker is available as a cloud service  as well, but can be run as a service in any Public Cloud or Private VPC, as software you can run either in the cloud or on-premises within popular containers like Docker and Kubernetes, and a turnkey appliance that offers massive capacity and low TCO. Best of all, you can mix and mix and match to build a system that cost-effectively meets all of your requirements.

But why is this important? Because event brokers store your data (and possibly sensitive data), many clients require this to be within the same network control boundary(VPC) they control with their own security policies. In addition, for resiliency and ease of integration, it is often best to deploy event brokers as close to the producers and consumers as possible and Solace PubSub+ lets you do just that.

Distributing Messages Across Environments

AnyPoint MQ queues and message exchanges are specific to the cloud region in which they were created, so it can be difficult to share messages or queues between regions. The only way to approximate messaging across regions is to have developers create custom programs that load balance between regions. This results in more work, complexity and testing.

Solace PubSub+ Event Broker, on the other hand, makes it easy to scale and federate your system across regions and environments by linking event brokers to create an event mesh that dynamically routes information and distributes queues across clouds, datacenters, and geographies. Applications or Integration flows produce and consume data and no longer have to worry where the queue/data resides.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Anypoint MQ offers crossover failover for standard queues, which provides resiliency by switching to a fallback queue in a fallback region when the primary region is down. It does not, however, have built-in support for duplicating messages across regions, so it does not offer data redundancy by replicating messages across the primary and fallback queues.

Solace PubSub+ Event Broker supports high availability and disaster recovery without the need for third-party components or services, and you can optimize your failover for fast performance or zero message loss by replicating events and their delivery states synchronously or asynchronously. This is huge for ensuring that critical business events are not lost, even in the event of service/network/region issues or outages.

Monitoring and Observability

Anypoint MQ does provide usage statistics on the number of messages and API requests, along with tools for managing queues and statistics, but does not support OpenTelemetry so doesn’t offer real-time visibility into the state and progress of messages.

Solace offers a monitoring solution called PubSub+ Insights that gives you continuous real-time information about the state of your infrastructure, and PubSub+ Distributed Tracing supports OpenTelemetry so you can see exactly where each message went and why.

Message Routing and Filtering

AnyPoint MQ routes information using flat topics that are a text string, like “NewOrders” and rely on subscribers to parse coarse information feeds to identify and process messages they need.

PubSub+ Event Broker uses hierarchical “smart topics” that can consist of many levels that let publishers describe the messages they’re publishing in great detail. By leveraging a combination of exact terms and wildcards, subscribers can express exactly which information they want, which might be “all new orders” or might be something as specific like “NewOrders for a certain product from the United States from existing customers.” This drastically reduces producer/consumer coupling while also making the event streams filterable for new use cases and integrations.

Conclusion

As you can see, if you need simple queueing only between Mulesoft integration flows then Anypoint MQ is great due to its tight integration with the Anypoint platform. But if you need more of a multi-system solution that supports custom apps, distribution to other iPaaS/ESBs, provides connectivity in a hybrid/multi-cloud scenario, then that is what Solace was built for. So again, it’s up to your use case and your needs. I hope that this article helps you understand the similarities and differences between these two technologies and helps you evaluate which one best solves your unique challenges.