A Muley Movember: APIs, MuleSoft, & Mustaches

MuleSoft. API Management. Mustaches. I know what you’re thinking. One of these isn’t like the others. What if I told you that growing a mustache has more in common with building complex APIs than you ever thought possible? Movember is upon us once again this year. Movember is a foundation based on growing glorious mustaches to raise awareness and charitable donations every November to support men’s health. To the connection of MuleSoft and mustaches, we’ve gone into detail and laid out 5 categories. Just like the razor, MuleSoft offers the most cutting-edge technology. 

So without further ado, I “mustache” you a question. Are you ready to gain a new perspective into the world of MuleSoft and mustaches?

Transform Your Look

Transformation is at the forefront of building an API as well as growing your mustache. Picture your technology stack and tell us what you see. Are there multiple services that are performing inconsistently, maybe your data is unreliable and dirty, or maybe you have become so bogged down with tech debt that you can’t see the forest through the trees? 

Now, just like before, picture a beard. One that is unruly and scraggly and has no shape or direction. While a mustache is a great way to transform your look, MuleSoft allows us to transform your data. With the help of MuleSoft, data transformations become simple, inconsistent services and endpoints can be rebuilt to perform at lightning speed, and tech debt will begin to clean itself up.

Choose Your Style

Now that you have committed to transformation, a style needs to be chosen. This is an important piece of the puzzle. Are you a Fu Manchu or a handlebars guy? Are you wanting to make a statement with this mustache or do you want it to be more functional? 

The same style question can be asked around your API network. What are you wanting your APIs to do? Are you having issues with lower-level services or would you like to build out multiple layers to handle the flow from client-facing UI to services and back? Maybe you need a complex sync process between multiple systems, which MuleSoft handles very well. Choosing a style is a key piece in the research and planning phase before any targeted progress can be made. Below are some of the more common styles/types of APIs:

• • • Open APIs: Allows any developer to access.
    • Partner APIs: Only authorized developers are given access.
    • Internal APIs: Allows for only internal teams to access.
    • Composite APIs: Combines multiple APIs.

Embrace Your Growth Patterns

You may be follicly or technologically challenged. Not everyone can grow a mustache or fully implement MuleSoft to build their API networks on their own. 

While Green Irony is here to help implement all of your MuleSoft needs, we can only offer tips and suggestions with the mustache growth. Slowly growing out your stache or replacing functionality over time in smaller pieces makes the transition and the growth seem less abrupt. 

Mustaches take time to grow. APIs take time to properly build and test. Knowing how you want to grow is pivotal to the overall success of a project. Using a modular API approach gives more flexibility over time. Small pieces over time allow for a seamless approach that allows you to continue building and replacing piece by piece, API by API, until you’ve reached your final form. Just like with a mustache, you don’t want to slap a temporary fake on your lip and call it natural. With this continuous growth process, your outdated systems become more performant and less error-prone without the inherent risk of a big bang approach.

Don’t Neglect Maintenance

So you’ve reached your final form. Production deployments are in the past and systems are connecting and running seamlessly. Or, you’re walking around with the most amazing mustache, comments are flowing in, and you’re even considering changing your name to Mustachio. You may think that it’s time to step back, accept the recognition, and move on, but maintenance is another key piece of the puzzle. You have to be good to the rest of your face and also be good to the rest of your technology stack. 

This is where investing in a quality team/trimmer comes in. Technology is constantly changing, data gets ugly fast, services go down. You must keep trimming, keep modifying, and keep your APIs up to date. This is one of the benefits of moving away from a point-to-point integration approach as it allows you to scale and lower complexity as future requirements arise.

With a mustache, you may notice that your handlebars are going all over the place and need some proper guidance or updates to straighten out. By giving us a much simpler way of updating or replacing APIs, MuleSoft does this by breaking out functionality into different API layers. To maintain a flow, it isn’t necessary to do a large rewrite. If one system needs to be updated or replaced, it’s as simple as building a new API or updating the old one without the need to impact the whole integration. Similar to maintaining your mustache, only the smaller areas will need to be affected.

Be Patient

MuleSoft is built to expedite the time to deliver and build out solutions in a much shorter timeline. Patience is a learned skill, but valuable for both growing a mustache and building complex integrations. Halfway through your MuleSoft project or mustache growth, you may not know what the final product will look like. 

Nobody will fault you for being anxious and concerned about the results. There is a lot of pressure with both of these topics, but with proper planning and following the steps above, you can have confidence in where you’ll end up. 

It’s like that famous quote, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” The same can be said for growing out an epic stache or building out a successful API network.

As you’re thinking about your next integration project or just starting to see the peach fuzz that will inevitably lead to an award-winning mustache, follow the suggestions above and you will surely find success. 

Please consider contributing to Movember to help raise awareness and support men’s health by growing mustaches, donating, or simply spreading the love. We hope you’ve had a fan-stache-tic time becoming more aware of the similarities between building with MuleSoft and growing a mustache and I hope we didn’t stubble over our words too much. I’d love to stay and chat, but I really “mustache.”