API gateway vs Mule server

Question

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Do they each have a specific purpose? Is one better suited than the other for a particular task?

Answer 1

They are two different distributions and serve different purposes.

API Gateway - It has specific features to communicate to Anypoint Platform to manage APIs, apply runtime policies, send analytics, track APIs.

Task- For deploying your proxy API Application

Mule Server - Mule server is the runtime you use for your integrations.

 Task- For deploying your actual implementation API Application

Answer 2

Since Mule runtime version v3.8.0, both are one and the same. This means that since that version, the runtime is shipped with API Gateway capabilities, and there is no more API Gateway specific distributions released. To enable API Gateway capabilities, if you have the correct entitlement, you only need to specify your organization credentials or environment credentials (this last, it is only applicable to Mule 4 or newer).

API Gateway capabilities are the only ones who "know" how to apply/un-apply Anypoint Policies and generate Analytics info, among other things.

For runtimes released before v3.8.0, the only way to leverage those capabilities was to use API Gateway distribution. For example, API Gateway v2.x is based on Mule runtime v3.7.x.