In the technical metaverse, there is an abundance of technologies that an organization uses. Almost all of them use a multitude of these technologies. Over the period, some of these need to be updated. Either a newer version comes out, or someone comes up with another tool/technology which can compete and win against the existing one. So, to maintain the currency of the stack, have a technical edge over the business competitors and reduce the time to market products, the organizations need to move on to the latest technologies. This movement is what we coin as “Migration”. Migration is not just a taboo but a need of the hour for many organizations that need to mobilize their technical infrastructure to gain higher returns on investment.
Let’s look at the million-dollar question. What triggers a migration?
One of the most common reasons any organization takes up migration is to increase business agility. Access to the latest technical assets is imperative for keeping pace with the competitors. The longer an organization takes to migrate, the more it loses out on the market shares. This is one of the significant reasons we see a lot of migration towards Cloud Resources. Migrating to newer tech also comes with the added feature of adding the latest security features, which help keep cyberattacks to a minimum. Some other triggers for migration triggers are usage of Open Standards, Implementation of new cloud strategies, moving from monolithic to micro service architectures and requirements of removing technical debts. All the mentioned are either singularly or collectively forcing a lot of organizations towards their respective migration journeys.
One other pressing migration stimulator is the End-Of-Life concerns of the hardware and software. In contrast, an organization strives hard to provide services to its customers. If the supporting IT infrastructure goes out of support, that poses a risk to the business continuity. Migration also has a positive side effect, which helps the organizations Enable Digital Transformation, the town’s buzzword. Also, migrating from legacy tech to cloud-based solutions helps increase productivity agility and unlock new avenues of revenue generation.
Whatever the reason for the migration, it will eventually and almost certainly remove the technical debts in the organization.
Organizations using MuleSoft as their integration tool face similar challenges. The users must plan the migration with the MuleSoft version 3.9 coming to end-of-life in March 2024.
![](https://www.prowesssoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Mule-3-to-Mule-4.png)
Source: mule-runtime-end-of-life
The Mule 3.9 version has already devolved in its extended support, which will end in the next few months. While migrating from MuleSoft to any other technology may take longer, migration from Mule3 to Mule4 is a relatively more straightforward task. Maintaining the currency and being on top of the game requires less effort than moving to a microservice or native cloud solution. Moreover, why to move? Mule provides complete MuleSoft-managed runtime planes such as CloudHub 1.0 and CloudHub2.0. Both variants have different flavours of cloud features as per the customers’ liking. Before we move on to the decision of How To there is a very big decision that needs to be taken by the stake holders. And that is the Approach. When you say approach, it basically boils down to two approaches,- AS IS Architecture
- Re-Architecture
- Easier and faster development
- Seamless access and data mapping
- Simplified connectivity
- Auto-tuned and highly performant
- Seamless upgrades of runtime and connector versions
- Is there a requirement for any RAML refactoring?
- Does the project have any custom implementations for parsing, file handling, cryptography etc?
- Is there a specific naming convention requirement?
- Do you have any logging and error handling standards or custom implementation?
- Refactor of Transformers, which have no support in Mule4.
- Replacing complex MEL with DataWeave2.x as MEL is not supported in Mule4.
- DWL1.0 to DWL2.0, where the syntaxes are different.
- Object Stores, which use a new connector in Mule4.
- Message Structure has also changed dramatically, wherein session, outbound, inbound and invocation properties are not supported.
- The Scheduler component in Mule4 replaces the Polling component.
- Mule4 uses the spring module as compared to calling the Spring Beans in Mule3
- Splitters are no longer supported in Mule4. Also, the aggregators have a different behaviour.
- Mule4 comes with a new validation module which replaces the filters in Mule3.
- The migration plan should also take into consideration any technical debt that is there and remediate the same.
- Meticulous planning and assessments of the migration.
- Need for duplicate environments (Mule4 env and Mule3 env) for a certain duration.
- Upskilling existing technical resources.
- Backfilling or recruiting any technical resource shortage.
- Clearly understanding any licensing requirements and its associated penalties if any.
- Big Bang Approach – Migrate all the applications at once.
- Iterative Approach – Application(s) are migrated in smaller groups.
- Big Bang Cutover
- Phased Cutover or Canary Deployment Method.