MuleSoft® has been a dominant integration player in Australia for a number of years. With a strong technology, and a high-performing sales and marketing team, MuleSoft® have been able to expand their technology footprint across the enterprise and mid-market in rapid time.
While MuleSoft® is designed to make cloud and hybrid integration easier, implementing and using it correctly still requires effort and skill. Key fundamentals of this is to understand your MuleSoft® core usage, which is what your billing cycle is tied to. To get the best out of their investment, our customers work with us to configure and operate their MuleSoft® cores and learn how to use them effectively.
In this blog, we outline the top 5 hacks to improve your MuleSoft® implementation. Here they are:
- Have the right option for your business that is aligned with your desired integration architecture.
MuleSoft® is versatile across Cloud Native, On-Premise or Hybrid cloud offerings. While these are all remarkably similar; how you set up your cores and where, is fundamental to your integration strategy. At this stage, choosing a cloud, on-prem or hybrid core model won’t affect your pricing – however, it’s important to get clear on your integration architecture before implementation in order to save yourself going back and forth while in the engineering and configuration phase.
- Get your architecture right. Have it reviewed by experts.
A key area where we come in to fix our customer Mulesoft® implementation problems is when there are complex architectures that span across multiple layers and create unnecessary complexity. For some reason, a number of our customers build in traditional architecture that encompasses legacy services from infrastructure and applications connecting to the cloud, when actually, they don’t need that service anymore.
It is never a bad idea to step back holistically as a business and go through the entire application network and integration model to understand its operational aspects, in alignment with business objectives and future plans.
Fundamentally, as a digitally flexible organisation, your architecture should be designed in a way to support numerous APIs that allow you to expand on new technologies and services as they arrive. The value that an integration expert team can bring is the strategic overlay of API and integration architecture that meets the demands of the business, while also decoupling complex functionality into simple API streams.
- Anticipate the volumes, speed and type of integrations that you will need.
Building for flexibility is a key value proposition of MuleSoft® – however, the number of APIs and integrations connected to your MuleSoft® cores will affect your licensing costs. Some things to consider include:
- The amount of data that will need to go through your API’s and from where.
- The speed at which it does – ie. Real time vs Near time, or batch versus continual streaming.
- Types of data coming through, whether it is structured or unstructured data from complex sources.
Creating a list of desired architectures will predict the number of cores that you will need today and in future. Some of these integrations may need multiple cores and may be better suited for implementation outside of MuleSoft® – best to work with an expert integration partner, like IntegrationWorks, to fully understand this before investing.
- Work that core!
Any opportunity to optimise your MuleSoft® cores and cut waste will ensure proper management of your MuleSoft® functionality. Some ways cores can operate wastefully is through amateur or inexperienced in-house coding that cause memory leaks or implementation errors that target the wrong processor for functioning. Following coding standards, a well-defined architecture and business logic rules will ensure your cores are all tuned to your requirements. If this knowledge is unavailable inside your organisation, then it’s best to seek external support from MuleSoft® specialists.
- Revisiting outcomes frequently to align value.
Having frequent reviews of the integration value proposition is vital to ensuring the integration layer and MuleSoft® investment maximises its full true potential. Some of the reviews can be to ensure that the APIs/integrations built on MuleSoft® are supporting the business needs such as delivery of digital services to customer personal devices, or ensuring that the platform functionality meets the technical requirements of specific hybrid, cloud or digital initiatives.
Where MuleSoft® expertise adds significant value:
A deep understanding of MuleSoft® when first implementing, or at the early buying stage, is crucial to a successful implementation and an optimised Return On Investment. It’s not an easy technology to learn in depth, and as a leading integration platform, it promises to be incredibly powerful when done right. Managing cores and API integrations across the platform is challenging, and if your business lacks the skills in-house then the opportunity to save money and enjoy quick deployment by engaging with skilled and experienced MuleSoft® consultants such as our team here at IntegrationWorks, is available to you. We can guide you to making the best decisions when choosing how many cores you need, what integration architecture is best for your organisation, what integrations are NOT best for your MuleSoft® stack and how to get set up as efficiently as possible.
If you would like to learn more, please sign up to receive one of our API strategy and architecture assessments that will help you optimise your existing or upcoming MuleSoft® implementation.