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Case Study Narrative

Hybrid MuleSoft Platform: RTF on OpenShift

Architected and delivered a secure, high-availability hybrid integration platform serving 5M+ members, leveraging MuleSoft Runtime Fabric (RTF) on OpenShift, F5 Big-IP, and enterprise GitLab CI/CD pipelines.

Context & Stakes

The legacy infrastructure relied on monolithic ESB patterns, which lacked the elastic scalability needed for a rapidly growing ecosystem of 120+ microservices. Manual deployment processes and fragmented observability led to inconsistent MTTR and limited governance. The objective was to engineer a modern, hybrid platform combining the cost-efficiency of on-prem OpenShift with the orchestration power of MuleSoft Runtime Fabric (RTF), targeting 99.9% uptime and a significant reduction in deployment friction.

Architecture & Mandate

graph TD Client[External Clients / Mobile / Web] --> F5[F5 Big-IP Load Balancer] subgraph ControlPlane[MuleSoft Anypoint Platform] API_Manager[API Manager] Runtime_Manager[Runtime Manager] end subgraph AWS[AWS Region - CloudHub 2.0] CH2_Ingress[CloudHub 2.0 Ingress] Exp_API[Experience APIs] Sys_API_CH[External System APIs] CH2_Ingress --> Exp_API Exp_API --> Sys_API_CH end subgraph OnPrem[On-Premise Data Center] OpenShift[Red Hat OpenShift Cluster] subgraph RTF[Runtime Fabric] RTF_Ingress[RTF Ingress Controller] Process_API[Process / Orchestration APIs] Sys_API_OP[Internal System APIs] RTF_Ingress --> Process_API Process_API --> Sys_API_OP end Backends[(Legacy DB / ERP / Mainframe)] Sys_API_OP --> Backends end F5 -->|External Traffic| CH2_Ingress F5 -->|Internal/Secure Traffic| RTF_Ingress Sys_API_CH -.->|VPN/Direct Connect| RTF_Ingress ControlPlane -.->|Management| Exp_API ControlPlane -.->|Management| Process_API ControlPlane -.->|Management| Sys_API_CH ControlPlane -.->|Management| Sys_API_OP classDef aws fill:#FF9900,stroke:#232F3E,stroke-width:2px,color:#fff; classDef onprem fill:#005276,stroke:#00A1E0,stroke-width:2px,color:#fff; classDef control fill:#00A1E0,stroke:#005276,stroke-width:2px,color:#fff; classDef lb fill:#1C9E5E,stroke:#0F5B36,stroke-width:2px,color:#fff; class AWS aws; class OnPrem onprem; class ControlPlane control; class F5 lb;
As the Technical Platform Lead, I was responsible for: - Designing the high-availability RTF on OpenShift architecture with F5 Big-IP for intelligent traffic management and TLS termination. - Engineering 100% automated GitLab CI/CD pipelines incorporating quality gates (MUnit), security scanning, and dynamic environment provisioning. - Establishing multi-region DR playbooks and automated secret rotation via AWS Secrets Manager. - Leading a cross-functional team of 15+ engineers through the migration of mission-critical member services.

Measurable Results

99.9% Uptime maintained during peak traffic for 5M+ members
40% Reduction in deployment windows (from days to minutes)
25% Operational efficiency gain via unified control plane
Eliminated manual configuration errors through 100% Infrastructure-as-Code

Post-Mortem: What I'd Do Differently

"In retrospect, I would have invested earlier in automated performance profiling within the CI/CD pipeline. While we hit our reliability targets, optimizing resource allocation on OpenShift became a manual overhead during peak traffic periods which could have been mitigated through automated load testing and predictive scaling."

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