mule - hub and spoke/broker or ESB - Mule in Action

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I am reading Mule in Action and various other blog posts around Mule ESB and the fact that it can be deployed as a Hub and Spoke architecture or an ESB.

I am struggling to see the difference between the two.

From what I understand:

1.both are used as a central focal point between applications 2.both can use routing/mediation/transformation etc. between services/apps

But the only difference i can really see is that hub and spoke typically have many different formats entering the hub(SOAP/REST/XML/JSON...) while ESB typically has a standard format(Usually just SOAP.)

Also I keep reading that hub and spoke introduces a single point of failure compared to an ESB(http://blogs.mulesoft.org/esb-or-not-to-esb-revisited-–-part/). So is the physical deployment the difference here? Where a hub has every possible endpoint and as ESB has endpoints deployed across multiple hubs? So an ESB is just multiple hubs(for want of better words)?

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mule

1 Answers

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I won't consider protocols in the hub-and-spoke versus ESB discussion, but only the deployment topology.

So, yes, you are right, the ESB is composed of multiple nodes that act as a single entity, and for this leverage distribution features like a shared H/A message oriented middleware and/or clustering technologies.

An ESB is first and foremost an architectural topology, not a product.