Flex Gateway Overview

The control plane is a MuleSoft-hosted platform that centralizes management and observability, enabling you to:

The gateway runtime receives commands from the control plane and routes and protects the backend APIs. Built with security in mind, Flex Gateway secures communications between the runtime and the control plane through mTLS and HTTPs.

Managed Flex Gateway is a fully hosted version of Flex Gateway on CloudHub 2.0, hosted and managed on the Anypoint Platform by MuleSoft. Managed Flex Gateway provides high availability, autoscaling, less operational overhead, and regular automatic patches and upgrades. It is designed to simplify API gateway operation through point-and-click setup, and monitoring, and MuleSoft handles the maintenance and infrastructure.

In Managed Flex Gateway, each runtime unit is called a gateway instance.

Self-Managed Flex Gateway is a distributed runtime entity that you can install in any cloud data center or, for testing purposes, on your local laptop. Self-Managed Flex Gateway requires you to manage the underlying infrastructure. Various installation options are available for the Self-Managed Flex Gateway, including Docker containers, as a sidecar to a backend application in a Docker container, as a Kubernetes Deployment, or on various Linux environments.

In Self-Managed Flex Gateway, each runtime unit is called a replica. For high availability, it is best to deploy Self-Managed Flex Gateway as a cluster with multiple replicas running in parallel. Using clusters increases gateway performance and robustness, and is recommended for high-performance applications that must scale.

Self-Managed Flex Gateway includes a Fluent Bit implementation, which enables log output to local files, or to aggregators such as New Relic, Sumo Logic, and Splunk. You can also configure external REDIS storage for use with distributed rate limiting and caching. Gateway replicas utilize this storage as a temporary workspace for rate limit coordination, which is pivotal in preserving customer service level agreements.

Self-Managed Flex Gateway can be installed in either of these two modes:

In Connected Mode, the gateway is fully connected to the MuleSoft control plane. This connection allows for centralized management, observability, and security. Anypoint API Manager enables full API lifecycle management and policy configuration. Anypoint Runtime Manager enables you to deploy and configure your gateway.

Choose Connected Mode for a UI-based experience to deploy policies, and for managing and monitoring the gateway.

You can also configure and manage a standalone gateway that is mostly disconnected from the control plane. Choose Local Mode for this experience.

In Local Mode, you manage all configuration and policy applications with locally stored declarative configuration files.

Use Local Mode to build CI/CD pipelines for application deployments.

The following table summarizes the differences between Connected Mode and Local Mode.

You can deploy Managed Flex Gateway on CloudHub 2.0 using Runtime Manager. For details see Deploy a Managed Flex Gateway to CloudHub 2.0.

You can install Self-Managed Flex Gateway in a variety of ways:

A standalone gateway is good for protecting a limited number of APIs with low transaction volume. However, for other scenarios, or if high availability and reliability are critical, consider using an Ingress controller in Kubernetes.

MuleSoft is responsible for:

When running on any target, you are responsible for:

When running in Kubernetes, you are responsible for:

See Viewing Usage Reports for information about your monthly Flex Gateway usage.