Mulesoft vs. OIC

OIC (Oracle Integration Cloud) and MuleSoft are the integration tools that enable you to integrate cloud and on-premises applications. Now the question is which should be chosen as an integration platform.

Below are some points that you may consider while subscribing to these platforms.

1. Scalability means the capability to change or scaleup

When we say servers are scalable at the run time, you may change the underlying server resources at run time. Resources may be Memory, Disk Storage, CPU, number of I/O operations performed 

 First, understand how applications are deployed and run on the underlying servers

Both MuleSoft (CloudHub) and OIC are IPAAS integration platforms where Cloud Hub uses workers to host the applications (integrations) and OIC uses OIC servers to host or as deployment servers.

Some points about the workers

• Workers are dedicated instances of the Mule runtime engine that run integration applications on CloudHub.
• Each worker has a specific amount of size to process data. You may choose as per need.
• Each worker runs in a separate container from every other application and each worker is deployed and monitored independently.

Worker Size	Worker Memory	Heap Memory	Disk Storage Size
0.1 vCores	1 GB	500 MB	8 GB
0.2 vCores	2 GB	1 GB	8 GB
1 vCore	4 GB	2 GB	12 GB
2 vCores	8 GB	4 GB	40 GB
4 vCores	16 GB	8 GB	88 GB
8 vCores	32 GB	16 GB	168 GB
16 vCores	64 GB	32 GB	328 GB

For CloudHub you have control over each integration application and you can decide how much server memory and other resources are required. You can increase or decrease the worker size as per the load. Meaning that it is scalable.

OIC

• OIC also scales up the servers to some extent and it's more dependent on the message pack that you have subscribed to. 
• It deploys all integration applications on the predefined or pre-allocated manage serves. 
• It does not deploy each integration or application on separate servers like cloud-hub does.
• So you do not have more control over individual integrations or underlying servers. You have to rely on Oracle and the subscription pack.

Note: Oracle has not published more details about OIC servers and their underlying resources

Comparison: MuleSoft Cloud-Hub is best over OIC in terms of scalability 

2. API Designing

• MuleSoft provides API Designers to develop API specifications either in RAML or OAS prior to API development.
• It will be published on Exchange and will be used to validate the functionality.
• The basis on these API specifications integration application scaffold can be generated which will save development time.

Such Features are not available in OIC.

3. Integration Architecture pattern

• MuleSoft has the flexibility to choose various integration style patterns and architectures have more controls to design integration applications that may be processed after a failure like 503 (Service Unavailable) Socket Timeout Exception etc.
• Mulesoft provides real-time and scheduled-based integration patterns as well as synchronous and asynchronous along with one-way integration patterns.
• It enables you to use MQ or Anypoint MQ connectors to achieve reliable communication.

OIC

• OIC has also predefined integration style patterns like Real Time(App-Driven), Scheduled, Publish to OIC, and Subscribed to OIC but the last two are deprecated.
• It's very difficult the develop and re-try mechanisms in OIC as compared to Mule.
• OIC out-of-the-box does not support reliable communication for long-running processes.

4. Caching 

• Mule soft enables you to use an HTTP cache to reduce the load on the servers by caching the data. 
• It provides two approaches to achieving it. 
• one is Cache Scope which will be used inside the mule code and the other one is cache policy which will be used on the proxy layer

OIC

• OIC does not provide such features.

5. Development Tool

• Mule soft provides Anypoint studio to develop the integrations 
• It also enables DataWeave for the transformation and its embedded in the studio itself

OIC

• OIC does not require any tool for the development
• It only requires a browser to develop integration
• It enables XSLT transformation with limited functions.

5. Monitoring 

• In Mule, you can't view the execution flow for each activity at runtime. 
• You have to depend on logs and the level of logs that will require more expertise in logging 
• Although we may use predefined or custom monitors to view the execution flow but is very limited.

OIC

• OIC provides rich features to view the run-time flow of the integrations and logs. 
• It also provides features like resubmit of the failed instances at run time for asyn one-way and scheduled-based integrations 

6. Development and Operational Cost

• Development and Operational cost is less as compared to Mule

References

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/paas/integration-cloud/oracle-integration-oci/overview.html

https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/application-integration/index.html

https://docs.mulesoft.com/runtime-manager/cloudhub-architecture