Strap in for a journey that takes you from the vibrant streets of Mumbai to the bustling tech scene of London, led by none other than Akshata Sawant, Senior Developer Advocate at Salesforce. We had the pleasure of delving into her career, starting from her time as a Newellsoft ambassador to her current influential role at Salesforce, where she’s truly making a difference by connecting with community groups across the globe. 

We dive deep into the robust capabilities of MuleSoft’s transformation from a simple API integration tool to a comprehensive automation suite. We also shine a light on Akshata’s co-authored book, “MuleSoft for Salesforce Developers,” which is a must-read for anyone interested in this space. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or a tech newbie, this episode’s got insights and conversations that you just can’t afford to miss!

Show Highlights:

  • Akshata’s work as a MuleSoft ambassador and her current role as Salesforce’s Senior Developer Advocate. 
  • Deep dive into MuleSoft’s evolution from a simple API integration tool to a comprehensive automation suite. 
  • Akshata’s co-authored book, “Mulesoft for Salesforce Developers,” offering insights for anyone interested in this field. 
  • The potential game-changers from MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform, such as AI capabilities and a Visual Studio Code plugin.
  • The capabilities of MuleSoft and the value of the platform for Salesforce developers. 
  • The Anypoint platform’s offerings and potential future developments.

Links:

Episode Transcript

akshata sawant:
Not really, but that was accidental. I wanted to become a doctor, but then I don’t know, I just got into engineering somehow.

josh birk:
That is Akshata Sawant, a senior developer advocate here at Salesforce. I’m Josh Birk, your host with the Salesforce Developer podcast. Here on the podcast you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we sit down and talk with Akshata about using MuleSoft in a perspective of having MuleSoft for Salesforce developers. But we are going to continue as we often do, right where we left off there with her early years.

akshata sawant:
Earliest memory with computer was playing those games, solitaire and whatnot, and then having those paint thing, the early Microsoft. I used to have a Microsoft computer. I guess most of us we had the same. So yeah, drawing some weird pictures and all. Then we were also introduced to internet, so surfing everything that I can think of.

josh birk:
Gotcha. Nice. When did you first start getting involved with MuleSoft?

akshata sawant:
First started with the MuleSoft, I think the beginning of my career itself. So my entire career has been about MuleSoft.

josh birk:
Okay.

akshata sawant:
So yeah, when I was in the first company, that’s when I was introduced to MuleSoft. I was trained on MuleSoft at first and then assigned a project, and I guess that’s where my MuleSoft journey started.

josh birk:
And how was your first experience with Salesforce itself?

akshata sawant:
With Salesforce, I recently completed one year at Salesforce, and it’s been amazing. I’m actually quite new to Salesforce. The ecosystem and the learning perspective as well, the platform and all. So I’m just trying to learn and get it combined with MuleSoft and trying to learn more about Salesforce as well.

josh birk:
Gotcha. How would you describe your current job?

akshata sawant:
Current job? It’s amazing. I love my current job. I have been doing this work as a MuleSoft Ambassador previously over the years, and now you’re actually getting paid for what you were doing as a hobby or as a passion.

josh birk:
So take a step back, describe the MuleSoft Ambassador Program for us.

akshata sawant:
Oh, MuleSoft Ambassador Program, I guess it’s almost similar to what we have for Salesforce MVP Program. So as a MuleSoft ambassador, you are already a MuleSoft meetup leader. You’re delivering sessions, you’re speaking at meetups, Dreamforce, TDX, you’re evangelizing MuleSoft among the community. So that’s what a MuleSoft ambassador does. As a developer advocate, I’m doing the same stuff. As an ambassador, I was doing this as a pastime when I was free, as a passion over the weekends and stuff, or maybe after work. I used to love that, being in the community, speaking at meetups, interacting with people, getting to know more people, the like-minded ones in the community and all. And yeah, that’s how it’s been about being an ambassador. But I don’t miss being an ambassador now that I’m part of Salesforce.

josh birk:
Where are you based exactly? What community groups have you been working with?

akshata sawant:
So initially, I used to work with community groups in Mumbai, so that’s where I’m actually from. Two years back I moved to London. So I’ve been hosting meetups across the UK, like London and Manchester mainly.

josh birk:
Got it. Okay. Now we’re going to get into a bunch of MuleSoft stuff here. However, we are going to level set for wildly, just in case there are people out there that are asking the question, what exactly is MuleSoft?

akshata sawant:
Oh, yeah, that’s my favorite question. I think I get a lot as well, from everyone, and I can go on talking about it for a long time. So basically MuleSoft, we all have, not all of us, but if you have heard about MuleSoft, the first thing that comes to your mind is like it’s a middleware integration tool. It’s an ESB tool. But that thing would’ve been relevant if we would’ve been talking two, three years back.

josh birk:
Okay.

akshata sawant:
But at this stage, or at this point, I think it’s just more than an API integration tool or integration platform or an iPaaS platform. It has so much more to provide when it comes to integration, that’s true. But now it’s also having an automation suite, we have Composer, MuleSoft Composer, which is like a no-code, low-code capability. We have RPA, robotic process automation, which takes the automation to the next level. So that’s a lot more, it’s not just limited to an ESP or middleware tool I would say.

josh birk:
So we’re not just talking about connecting connectors at this point. There’s an application layer running on top of this as well.

akshata sawant:
Yes.

josh birk:
Okay.

akshata sawant:
So it’s not just about connectors or connecting different systems. We are taking these connectors to a next level where we are having all the entire API management capabilities, API design, building, deploying. No matter where your application is hosted or using what you’re building the application, you can still manage them using MuleSoft.

josh birk:
Tell me a little bit more about that. So if I have an application running on Amazon, for instance, what kind of management does MuleSoft provide there?

akshata sawant:
So if you have an application which you are managing on Amazon, so if you want to take care of the… And it is one of the application, but you have other applications which are hosted somewhere else, you can still manage them on MuleSoft. I mean, the post deployment management. If you can need management in terms of security, monitoring, sending out alerts or tracking if there is anything fishy going on, if there is something spooky kind of so you can do…

josh birk:
No, I want that.

akshata sawant:
So you can actually manage all of that on MuleSoft, no matter what your application is barely using. It need not be a Mule application, it could be any of the third party application like using Java, Python or anything. No matter where it is hosted, you can still bring them all together on one unified platform and manage it out.

josh birk:
I love the idea of a spooky alert episode.

akshata sawant:
Yeah.

josh birk:
So then that I think dives into… Once again, I’m skipping around my question. So that sounds more like MuleSoft has implemented more like CI and CD tools than I think most people would be thinking.

akshata sawant:
You can implement CI/CD as well, you can integrate MuleSoft applications with your current CI/CD pipeline.

josh birk:
Okay.

akshata sawant:
But yeah, that is something of an additional capability other than integration. But the main focus always remains, it has an integration tool and unlocking systems basically. Unlocking the data, which might be in silos and which is unattended for a long time. But if you want to get a value out of it, if you want to perform some complex logical transformations, because definitely using Salesforce as well, you guys can connect to any end system. But then taking it to another level, you are bringing out data from different end systems, you’re composing them, you are just transforming it into a different level. You’re performing logical transformations. So that is something which you can do with MuleSoft, the heavy operations.

josh birk:
Got it. Okay, well, speaking of Salesforce, you co-authored a book, MuleSoft for Salesforce Developers. Just first of all, how did that get started? When did you first start thinking you wanted to create something in book form?

akshata sawant:
I wasn’t actually thinking about it. That was something by accident as well. So yeah, I mean, I used to write blogs in my free time. Over the past five years, I’ve written several blogs for different publishers and all. So this publication, PAC publication, they came across my blog and they were like, “Yeah, we would like to connect with you. We have this idea of a book which is about MuleSoft, which we would like to go ahead with.” I was like, “Okay, I hope you guys know that I still have five years of experience in industry and I’m not sure. I’ve just written a blog, which would be a one page or two page blogs kind of thing, and we’re talking about a book. How is it going to happen?” I was actually nervous about the idea as well because that was a far fetch dream or something, which I had never thought about. But then things fell in place and it happened.

josh birk:
It didn’t turn into just a three-page book.

akshata sawant:
It did not. It’s a huge one. I also have other co-authors, which were nice.

josh birk:
Okay. For the uninitiated, tell me a little bit about how different the journey was from being able to just sit down and take your thoughts and put it into a blog post versus actually having to work with co-authors and editors and have something published into a book?

akshata sawant:
So working with co-authors, it was easy because they are my kind of friends and they are community members, so we were already knowing each other for a long time, so that was easy with co-authors. With PAC publication, it was easy with the publication as well because they were actually quite supportive and they used to help with revisions and all. They used to take care of the other tasks, other than the technical stuff, whatever the non-technical activities, so they used to handle it. When we used to write the book and everything, it was so different than writing a blog, a simple blog, because it’s an entire chapter which you have to write, and then firstly forming the outline, and then it’s an additional task as well. So you have to devote all your weekends, your late nights, early mornings. So that’s how the last year has been. It’s been about the book.

josh birk:
Got it. The book is out and it’s available on Amazon, correct?

akshata sawant:
Yeah, it’s available on Amazon.

josh birk:
All right, well we’ll get a link to that in the show notes. So let’s dive a little bit into the topics of the book itself. So Salesforce developer integration is one of our main services. How do you think a Salesforce developer should have a mindset when it comes to approaching MuleSoft?

akshata sawant:
So as a Salesforce developer, while approaching MuleSoft, you should be clear with your basics. Basics about what is integration tool or what is a cloud platform and iPaaS tool, what are you expecting from it? Basic concepts of APIs, REST APIs or [inaudible 00:10:12]. Basically as a Salesforce developer, if you’re approaching this book, or maybe MuleSoft as well, just your basics should be clear, the basics which we have already studied back in college, I think that should be good.

josh birk:
Gotcha. Nice. And what does it look like from an integration point of view with the Salesforce developer? Is it just a new API that we’re talking to or is there a deeper connection to that?

akshata sawant:
I think there’s a deeper connection when it comes to integrating Salesforce and MuleSoft, and also from a Salesforce developers or admin perspective, because there are so much more capabilities which MuleSoft provides when it comes to Salesforce. We can actually connect to all the clouds, different clouds like Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Data Cloud, and everything. There are so much more options, I’m sure. There are several accelerators as well present, which makes the integration easier. So with Salesforce and MuleSoft being now one part of 360 circle, so I think we are having more and more capabilities and we are coming up with more stuff, just making connections easier.

josh birk:
Gotcha. Can you give me a lifecycle of, let’s consider a normal Salesforce application like a Sales Cloud communicating to MuleSoft, what kind of applications do you see running on either the MuleSoft site or beyond that kind of work together with these kinds of integrations?

akshata sawant:
So with Sales Cloud, you would be definitely having some other end share associated, which are connected to Sales Cloud where you’re getting the data from. So all these applications, while you’re getting the data from, you can transform the data which is coming from all these applications, and you can transform them and process the application. You can write your own complex transformation logic. So while you’re working with the Sales Cloud, as in this, let’s suppose data is coming from NetSuite app and everything, everywhere else, right?

josh birk:
Gotcha.

akshata sawant:
If you’re getting it in the MuleSoft, you’re processing the data, you’re formatting it, you’re making sure that you’re adding the API-like connectivity. So even if in future, if any of the system has to be replaced with something else, you’re doing it with ease. So with MuleSoft, you can just think it of as you’re building a Lego block.

josh birk:
Okay.

akshata sawant:
So you’re building actually a composable architecture, and if you want to replace one of the block with a different color block or different shape or something, you can still do it within no time. And for that you do not have to build the entire sculpture or entire block from the scratch. It’s just that you’re replacing one API with another, just like the way you’ll replace one Lego block with another.

josh birk:
Got it. And on top of MuleSoft itself, what kind of languages do you support?

akshata sawant:
Okay, so basically I would say that MuleSoft is more of a no-code, low-code tool where we more focus on the integration and the coding part is almost taken care of.

josh birk:
Got it.

akshata sawant:
But when we are speaking about the transformation or logical operations, so for that we have a scripting language, which is called as DataWeave, and it’s quite easy as well to perform all this logical transformations. Other than that, if you are someone who’s like a coder, hardcore coder and wants to stick the technical site, so you can actually build this MuleSoft connectors and all from scratch, you can get in your Java knowledge as well in picture, or you can build any of the custom policies as well. So if you want to get technical side or heavy coding or something, there’s a scope for that as well, but the prominent one is DataWeave.

josh birk:
And we’ve talked about DataWeave on the show because a curious thing kind of happened where Salesforce turned DataWeave into an Apex hosted language, which is kind of amazing.

akshata sawant:
Yeah, it’s still about to be… I mean, it’s still in the plan I guess.

josh birk:
Yeah. But the DataWeave that we’re running within Apex, its basically a hundred percent native version of what-

akshata sawant:
Native version.

josh birk:
… MuleSoft is running, right?

akshata sawant:
Yeah, that’s true. I’m yet to learn more about it. So I’m still on the MuleSoft side and slowly going to the Salesforce side.

josh birk:
Okay. If I’m going to pick up a language like DataWeave, is there a language JavaScript that it’s relatively similar to?

akshata sawant:
Yeah, I guess so, it is. Because JavaScript as well is like more on the scripting side, right?

josh birk:
Right.

akshata sawant:
So DataWeave is also similar kind of thing.

josh birk:
Right. Give me a really good use case for using DataWeave.

akshata sawant:
Okay. Suppose if you’re having a data which is coming from system A, which needs to be transformed, you’re getting fields like your first name, last name, company name, and then you want to merge your first name, last name, and your date of birth to some different format. If you’re getting this data in form of [inaudible 00:15:05], you want to transform it into JSON and a different format kind of thing. So for this transformation you can use DataWeave.

josh birk:
It’s kind of astonishing to me, to be honest. I mean, I’m thinking of the early days of extract, transform, and load, right?

akshata sawant:
Yeah, ETL.

josh birk:
Yeah. And it’s like you had to take two tables and kind try to smoosh their faces together and hope for the best.

akshata sawant:
Hope for the best.

josh birk:
And now it’s like you can tell it to be exactly this kind of format and DataWeave supports. It’s not just JSON, right, you could do CSV. Or is it any text-based text export? Is that a good way to describe it?

akshata sawant:
You can have any kind of data format XML, JSON, Java, or CSV or anything. Basically. We also have this DataWeave playground where we can actually play with different kinds of data. It’s on cloud-based thing, a website basically, where you can just play around with different types of data formats and try what you want. So it’s all about you, your imagination, your use case.

josh birk:
I love it. I love it. Let’s go back to spooky alerts a little bit. When it comes to… I’m going to keep using the phrase as much as possible. So an Apex developer, we’re very used to unit testing and test coverage, and we have the test coverage requirement that we have to hit before we can go to production. Does MuleSoft provide testing suites similar to that?

akshata sawant:
Yes. And the best part, you do not have to write the test scripts from scratch. You have MUnit test case recorder, which will be just recording. I mean, you need to trigger the mule flow, it will just capture whatever things are going on, whichever flow it’s going, and it’ll prepare a test script for you, a unit test script.

josh birk:
Really?

akshata sawant:
Yeah.

josh birk:
Can we steal that for Salesforce?

akshata sawant:
Yes, definitely you can. So yeah, I mean, as a developer, I used to be annoyed when I’m writing a test script. It used to be like, “Okay, we have to cover this scenario, this scenario. And I’m still not getting the coverage, I’m still not reaching the threshold level or something.” So yeah, the MUnit test case recorder, I think it arrived around two or three years back. And since then our life has been easier, I would say.

josh birk:
Wow, okay. I like this. And when it comes to things like things are going wrong, let’s be specific about the spooky alert. What kind of identification system does MuleSoft provide?

akshata sawant:
Okay. So when things are going wrong, the first thing… I mean, if there is a person who’s constantly monitoring dashboard on daily basis, something, he can see that in the dashboard. But the best one is when you’re sending the alerts, you can actually send an alert to your entire group thing or a particular email address or be notified as soon as there is some spooky alert, or as soon as there is something like if the number of requests are more than the usual or if the CPU consumption is quite high or something like that. If there’s something suspicious happening, DDoS attack or anything, you’ll be getting notified by email. Or you can also integrate your MuleSoft with Slack, so you’ll be getting a Slack notification if there’s something going wrong.

josh birk:
Oh, I like that. Now, one of the chapters I noted in the book, which was kind of one of those things, I’m like, well, that makes a lot of sense. What tips and tricks do you have for creating and designing documentations and specifications around APIs?

akshata sawant:
So for API documentations, we always prefer exchange because traditionally we have been preferring exchange to maintain everything at one place. So it is more like repository where you have all the applications and then you can also extend the APIs and write a proper documentation for your APIs. But recently, a month ago, the Anypoint Experience Hub has been released. And so that is something which is based on Experience cloud. So you can actually create an API catalog where it’s more like a app store kind of thing, where you have all these APIs, applications portrayed in a very fancy manner. So you’re actually creating a personalized thing, personalized portal for yourself, for your company, for your organization using API Experience Hub.

josh birk:
Nice. And I’m realizing we’ve talked a lot about applications, tools, spooky alerts, documentation, and we only just now mentioned the word Anypoint when you say Anypoint specifically, what are we talking about there?

akshata sawant:
Okay, so Anypoint is Anypoint platform. So Anypoint platform is the iPaaS capability of MuleSoft, and that is actually where the real fun starts. I mean, I would say fun for me because… Yeah, it might not be fun for all, but yeah, it’s fun for me because I’m actually into this for a long time and I love doing it. So yeah, Anypoint platform is a place where you get everything under one place or it’s like one place top for all kind of thing. So you can design your APIs, you can publish your APIs to Anypoint Exchange. Even if you’re someone who has never designed an API, you can still design an API without knowing the syntax or anything.

josh birk:
Gotcha.

akshata sawant:
Then you can just deploy your APIs or applications, Mule applications on Cloud App, which is the cloud platform, which provides the hosting services, okay. You can also manage your APIs, you can provide security to your APIs, you can implement different policies. No matter where application is hosted or using what it is built, you can still manage it and you can monitor your application. So basically it has so many capabilities, which can be sometimes overwhelming.

josh birk:
Nice, nice. We’re throwing the forward-looking statement out there. Two questions. One, is there anything on the horizon that you’re excited about?

akshata sawant:
Yes, I’m definitely excited about the AI part, which should be coming, okay?

josh birk:
Okay.

akshata sawant:
And the new code, a new studio. So currently, if you have seen, so all of us, mostly whoever has started the MuleSoft journey over the years, we all have been working on Anypoint Studio, which is more like a Eclipse based studio, which is built on top of Eclipse. So now we are going to get a cloud-based studio Id and also we are going to have a Visual Studio plugin, so you can actually design Mule application using Visual Studio code. Yeah, so we have a forward-looking statement here. So I think it’s safer to say that it should be out by around October time.

josh birk:
Okay. Okay. Yeah, don’t worry. I make this joke all the time, how every now and then you can kind of hear air quotes. My audience is very used to hearing the asterisk at the end of sentences that it’s like, “Yeah, we understand, it may or may not actually happen.” But I like that because it kind of connects all the dots of what we’ve been talking about because Salesforce developers now mostly live in VS code. So Salesforce developers want to start working with this kind of integration and kind of application platform, then it’s going to be all in the same house.

akshata sawant:
Yes.

josh birk:
Nice. Now you snuck it in there a little bit, and I’m going to give you as many asterisks as you want. But how do you think, because AI is all the buzz, and I swear to God, I think I’ve accidentally asked questions like this at this point, how do you think AI is going to start changing how people work with platforms like MuleSoft?

akshata sawant:
Okay, so what I have been like after speaking to the product managers and all, what I think is it’ll be mainly helping with… I mean the AI, what we are talking about at Salesforce is only generative AI. So it’ll be more of for predicting the next best possible action, what would be the next possible flow thing or the next possible component which you could be using in your flow, which could be making more sense from the integration perspective, which will be giving you more optimized integration. So something like that. Or whenever you’re designing an API, what will be the next possible best action which you can take for your API, how you can enhance it, how you can make it more better composable.

josh birk:
And that’s our show. Now before we go, I did ask after Akshata’s favorite non-technical hobby, and it turns out it’s something she puts a little step into.

akshata sawant:
Yeah, A lot of people don’t know, but I’m actually a classical dancer.

josh birk:
Really?

akshata sawant:
Yeah.

josh birk:
When did you start to learn that?

akshata sawant:
Okay. Ever since I was a kid I was so much into dancing, and so I’ve been learning, taking classes. After I moved to London. I have been practicing salsa a lot, so yeah.

josh birk:
I want to thank Akshata for the great conversation information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now we are going to be slowly transitioning the show over to the wonderful Julian [inaudible 00:23:48]. And so when I say I’ll talk to you next week, sometimes that actually might turn out to be Julian because we’re sort of mixing up some of the schedule coming up. But anyway, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast. You can hear old episodes, see the show notes of links to your favorite podcast service. One of us will talk to you next week.

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