The Endless End of Life Cycle with MuleSoft

Sometimes it’s not easy being a MuleSoft customer. While we’ve never been there, many of our customers have. 

The licensing model is expensive, with support and maintenance also eating into the bottom line. Training (or hiring) people to work with the technology is another obstacle, with special certifications and courses eating into IT budgets. According to our annual survey, maintenance and training top the list of non-iPaaS integration budgets, consuming almost 40% of the spend. So this is no small feat.

Technology in its heyday was amazing, offering integration capabilities for SaaS, on-premises software, legacy systems, and other platforms. But the technology of the early 2000s isn’t enough for organizations that need to make significant changes. Today, enterprise integration is an enabler of innovation and agility. If it’s holding back business, it’s not doing its job.

>>  Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business.  

A MuleSoft Inflection Point: End of Life

A big driver for companies moving away from MuleSoft is the messy and expensive end-of-life (EOL) experience. For example, Mule Runtime Engine V4.3 recently returned from standard to extended support.

While extended support for Runtime Engine may seem reasonable as a final step in the end-of-life journey, you need to read the fine print. Once a version enters extended support, baseline business functionality is denied until the customer upgrades to the new version. And we’re not talking about a minor inconvenience. We’re talking about the ability to restart applications or create new ones in CloudHub, the MuleSoft integration platform. How well would your business function if these application activities were suspended?

Un-Appy Apps

Upgrading to the next version of the Runtime Engine is not a seamless experience, especially when managing your existing applications.

When a Mule application is created, the developer selects the Runtime Engine on which the application will run, also known as the target Mule version. Each application is created this way, and as applications are created over time, it is not uncommon for the target Mule versions to be different per application. You can see where we are going with this.

MuleSoft provides a feature flagging mechanism. It helps identify applications and change the behavior of the Mule instance depending on the minimum Mule version assigned to the application when it was created. Confused? Here is the MuleSoft article to provide you with even more details.

This feature is intended to provide backward compatibility, but it’s complicated. Although advertised as “automatic,” it still requires a lot of manual work, as each application will need an individual feature flag. 

Once the applications that need to change the target Mule version have been identified, a developer must touch each one by importing the application into Anypoint Studio as a Mule project and changing the Mule version manually by selecting it from the Server Runtime menu. This greatly increases the time for certified developers and costs money to spend on manually cleaning up the EOL house.

A compatibility conflict

It would certainly help if compatibility was guaranteed. But that is never a given. In fact, it is rarely guaranteed if the new version is considered major (e.g. Runtime 4.x vs. 5.x). 

While MuleSoft promises “potential compatibility” in minor releases, there is no certainty and little insight, making it difficult to plan and resource for the next cycle.

The High Costs of MuleSoft EOL

With such a complicated and labor-intensive model, it’s no surprise that the Mule Runtime EOL experience comes at a cost. Here are some considerations:

1. Resources: We’ve already covered the cost and time required to certify some or all of your workforce to learn how to use MuleSoft. Assigning these people to work on basic maintenance tasks diminishes an already fluctuating ROI.
2. Organizational capacity: While experienced teams are busy running applications, one piece of code at a time, important work is left idle and IT backlogs continue to grow. Out-of-control IT backlogs are one of the main drivers for MuleSoft customers to move to Digibee.
3. Repetitive work cycles: Release lifecycles are getting shorter, forcing MuleSoft customers to do everything over again at an increasingly rapid cadence. For example, Runtime V4.3 ended standard support on June 7, 2023, while 4.4 will end on February 7, 2024. 
4. Business interruptions: If you don’t have a full complement of MuleSoft developers sitting around looking for work, chances are you won’t upgrade on day one. The inability to restart and deploy new applications presents real risks to your operation, increasing the potential for downtime and business disruptions.

The Digibee difference

The best MuleSoft upgrade for many companies is when they upgrade to Digibee's modern integration platform as a service (iPaaS) technology.

Here are just a few of the key points:

• There are no updates for you to worry about. Forever.
• There is not need for engineers and developers to invest 8-10 weeks to learn and get certified. With Digibee, the learning curve is days. No specialized skills are required, and it's free. Our customers will never pay to learn.
• A Easy to use drag and drop interface is accessible for both junior and experienced professionals, allowing everyone to contribute with fewer errors and faster time to value.
• There is not dependence on custom integrations and other support. The low-code pricing model for procoders allows in-house teams to scale, monitor, and build integrations from scratch, all in one place.
• Digibee is cloud-native, engine-based and built on Kubernetes, leaving MuleSoft's on-premises architecture behind.

To learn more about the advantages of Digibee's iPaaS technology versus MuleSoft, take a moment to contact us.