Accelerate Your MuleSoft Capability: Enabling C4E Lite

For many Small to Medium Businesses (SMBs), MuleSoft offers a powerful integration platform—but without the luxury of large teams or enterprise-level governance structures, getting the most from the platform can be challenging. This blog is designed for SMB technology leaders, IT managers, integration leads, architects, platform owners, and hands-on MuleSoft developers who want to improve quality, avoid common pitfalls, and gain more value from their MuleSoft investment.

By the end of this blog, you’ll have a clear understanding of what a C4E Lite model looks like, the minimum best practices required to keep your MuleSoft platform healthy, secure, scalable, and cost-effective, and the roles and responsibilities an SMB should prioritise to ensure ongoing success.

Background

Those familiar with MuleSoft have likely come across the term ‘Centre for Enablement’ or C4E for short.  Not too dissimilar to a Centre of Excellence (CoE) that larger companies often deploy, a C4E is generally a cross-functional team empowering MuleSoft Integration in various ways. By its definition, it includes several key members or roles, usually on a permanent basis.

While acceptable in larger corporations, Small to Medium Sized Businesses (SMB) who commence a MuleSoft journey often have limited resources and so a dedicated team to make up a C4E is often passed over.  This can cause issues along the journey, leading to poor practices, incorrect utilisation of licencing (under and over), and perhaps disenchantment, or in worst case, replacement, of what is really an excellent product.

At Adaptiv, we have seen companies of various sizes not deploying C4E practices due to budgetary constraints, or poor initial product enablement, leading to a less than acceptable use of the product in general. To counter this, we promote the use of C4E Lite – defined roles, and a list of minimum best practices that the smallest of MuleSoft teams can deploy and adhere to.

Before delving into C4E Lite, let’s recap some key roles and responsibilities of a full sized conventional C4E team, so we can compare what roles we can reduce, substitute or reassign.

The Conventional C4E Team

The conventional C4E is a cross-functional team model designed to drive reuse, agility, and innovation across integration projects.  The team exists in its own right and sits outside of the delivery teams. Roles include:

1. Product Evangelist – A key role in promoting the platform and driving integration initiatives and opportunities, understands and promotes newly released features
2. Product Manager – Drives the lifecycle, reports on business value, link to stakeholders (C-suite)
3. Security and Governance Officer – Enforces security and compliance to Standards
4. Platform Administrator – Manages access and environments, reviews consumption and health
5. DevOps Engineer – Automates CI/CD pipelines, manages deployments and monitoring
6. Integration Architect – Designs applications using API Led Architecture incorporating Integration Patterns, promotes scalability and reuse, sets technical vision
7. Lead Developer – Builds reusable applications, often complex System Layers, creates templates and reusable code, sets and adheres to best practices and mentors other developers
8. Business Analyst – Brings business requirements to the team, identifies new integration opportunities

Let’s combine or offload some of these roles and responsibilities for our C4E Lite version.

The C4E Lite Concept

With understanding that many SMBs utilising MuleSoft will not have resources to formulate a true C4E team, let’s view C4E Lite as a concept, recognising important roles, and following best practices to ensure the entire MuleSoft platform is fit for purpose.

It is important to note here that while a C4E Lite team may be part of a delivery team, it must be endorsed by the company that these roles are essentially Lead and Governance roles for MuleSoft use within the company and have higher responsibilities than general delivery team members.

C4E Lite Roles

Subject to resourcing capacity of the company, the roles of the C4E Lite team can be condensed as follows, adding responsibilities from other C4E roles. Both are considered to be the ‘go to’ MuleSoft resources within the company.   For initial Platform Enablement, or a MuleSoft Heathcheck on an established platform, consider engaging a MuleSoft Partner to help guide this process, especially when internal MuleSoft capability is low.

Integration Architect

It is highly desirable that the ‘Integration Architect’ role of the C4E Lite team is a dedicated role, even after the platform is well established.  It is important to have a key figure who ‘owns’ the platform.  Duties as follows:

• Leads design of MuleSoft applications using common integration patterns.
• Provides templates for designs, promotes best practices, and reviews designs from the MuleSoft teams.
• Has strong ties with Enterprise and Solution Architects, and works with Business Analysts.
• Platform Management – access and environments, reviews consumption and health.
• Picks up the product evangelist role to promote use of MuleSoft within the company.
• Drives the lifecycle, reports on business value, link to stakeholders (C-suite).
• Becomes the link to MuleSoft Account Executives, Solution Engineers and Support.
• Seeks to understand emerging technologies and where they fit into the company’s needs.
• Understands Security and Governance requirements. Liaises with CSO and Security team.
• Drives quality by enforcing standards across the MuleSoft teams.

Lead Developer

The Lead Developer role for the C4E Lite team can co-exist within a delivery team if not directly part of it.  Even better, rotate the Lead Developer from the C4E Lite team through the delivery teams to enhance and quickly spread MuleSoft knowledge. Duties include:

• Works closely with the Integration Architect, supporting them in some aspects, such as evangelising the product, and performing platform management duties.
• Builds reusable applications, often complex System Layers, creates templates and reusable code.
• Sets and adheres to best practices for development and testing, and mentors other developers.
• Assumes the DevOps role – automates CI/CD pipelines, manages deployments of common applications and monitoring of all applications via Monitoring tools.
• Keeps abreast of new technologies that can aid development, such as generative AI capabilities.

Training needs

It is important that these (the Integration Architect and the Lead Developer) are assigned to people having or attaining MuleSoft knowledge.  This includes training and certifications as follows:

• MuleSoft Certified Developer Level 1 (both)
• MuleSoft Certified Platform Architect (Architect, and optionally Lead Developer)
• MuleSoft Certified Catalyst (Architect) – a structured approach to planning and building MuleSoft applications

The pathway extends to:

• MuleSoft Certified Developer Level 2 (Lead Developer)
• MuleSoft Certified Integration Architect (Architect)

C4E Lite Best Practices

A typical SMB is now likely to be running on CloudHub, MuleSoft’s iPaaS Anypoint Platform.  We find many issues on existing platforms arise from poor initial set up or ongoing bad practices.  Here are some steps to alleviate issues down the track:

Platform Enablement

Security

• Set up Teams in a Role Based Access Control (RBAC) manner.
• Have separate Teams for internal staff and external contractors or consultants.
• Assign permissions to teams using Privileges of Least Use.
• Assign New Users to one or more Teams. Never add permissions to a user.
• Disable or remove users as they exit. Add this action to any Offboarding procedures.
• Remove the ability for Teams with users to install applications in CloudHub.
• Set up Connected Apps for deployment via CICD processes.
• Sep up SSO if required. If not, MFA is mandatory now, don’t override.

API Manager / API Governance

• Subject to licencing, we recommend RESTful applications hosting HTTP endpoints are secured via API Manager.
• Subject to licencing, use API Governance to ensure best practices are enforced when building interfaces.

Observability, Monitoring and Logging

• Set up Anypoint Visualiser Tags as part of CICD.
• Set up Monitoring to monitor application health.
• Consider additional logging requirements for MuleSoft limitations if required.

DevOps

DevOps is mandatory – CI/CD will reduce deployment failures, environment inconsistencies, enhance security, reduce manual configuration and bottlenecks.  Forget deployments from Anypoint Studio or uploading a jar file into CloudHub.  Get your DevOps sorted early, and you’ll have controlled releases from the start.

• A git-based cloud repository with deployment capability is mandatory. We find the easiest to set up and use are Azure DevOps, Bitbucket with Pipelines or GitHub with GitHub Actions.
• Set up repositories as one-per-application.
• Use a recognised Branching Strategy. We find Gitflow Workflow suits MuleSoft applications and migration through the application lifecycle.
• Set up secret keys as hidden variables (with restricted access) or in a secure key vault and inject into build/deploy pipelines.
• Include Munit tests that fail deployments if minimum coverage not achieved.
• Set up deployment pipelines and clone for each new application.
• Use the pipelines to configure applications – e.g., worker size, number of workers.
• Use the Connected App defined above to connect DevOps to CloudHub.
• Use pull requests and peer reviews to ensure code quality.

Documentation

MuleSoft is a low code platform, and we can treat documentation the same way, subject to the following:

• Document for quality, not quantity.
• Always include a High-Level Solution Diagram and Network Diagram depicting MuleSoft applications in the API-Led Architecture.
• Build an Integration Catalogue as an overview that points to pages within the Wiki or Confluence.
• Treat the Anypoint Platform as the Source of Truth. Avoid reproducing content that is already in the Anypoint Platform (Exchange, API Manager, Access Management, Network Connectivity), and available with the appropriate access.  It quickly comes out of date.
• Never expose ANY client IDs and secrets in documentation.
• Consider a Key Design Decision (KDD) register to track KEY decisions.
• Provide templates for all required documents.
• Review documents produced for quality, the same way we do for code.
• Diagram source (Lucid, Visio, Draw.IO, Mermaid etc) should be kept for later change. Provide links to source next to the image version embedded in the document.
• Have a Knowledge Base, including how to onboard new starters, and get architects and developers being productive quickly.

Design

• Design for re-use using API-Led Connectivity.
• Avoid point-to-point architecture which can increase consumption of flows.
• Build common fragments and common data models and publish to Anypoint Exchange for re-use.
• Build example of an API definition in Exchange that passes API Governance, and contains the traits, CDM, Examples and Security requirements. AI can help in documenting Exchange assets.
• Publish all assets to Exchange for mocking and discoverability.
• Use MuleSoft’s Caching capability to protect downstream systems from overload.

Coding

• Formulate coding best practices and standards and publish in your Wiki or Confluence.
• Encourage the use of standards through shadowing senior developers.
• Generative AI tools will accelerate code delivery and learning, subject to the AI Considerations below.
• Ensure code reviews and pull requests are enforced to maintain high quality.

Usage

The consumption-based model can be costly if limits are exceeded. Poorly architectured and developed applications can be wasteful on Flows.

• If on Consumption Based pricing, take regular note of the Usage reports, especially for Flows and APIs in API Manager.
• Every inbound entry point to an application is another flow, so do not create flows that are not required.
• Comment out the console endpoint that is generated by the API Kit Router, before moving to CloudHub.
• Data and Message usage have reasonable limits but watch data throughput which can grow quickly depending on usage and if large files are processed. Likewise, Messages can be consumed rapidly if applications are poorly designed, make unnecessary calls or have unlimited replays of event messages in error.

AI Considerations

The steady increase in the use of AI, not only in Generative AI, but also more agentic implementations (the increasing interest and use of A2A and MCP) highlights the need for the members of the C4E Lite team to understand and embrace new technologies.

While there will be gains in velocity of development due to the rapid improvement of AI design, coding and documentation tools for generation and testing of MuleSoft applications, never assume generated code is better or works as intended – always thoroughly check and re-test.

Additionally, there are security concerns in what is sent to Generative AI tools and stored in LLMs, so always anonymise any data and examples sent, and set up and adhere to a company endorsed AI Use Policy so developers have guardrails to best practices.

Summary

Establishing a C4E Lite gives SMBs the structure, governance, and clarity they need to unlock the full value of MuleSoft—without the overhead of a large enterprise C4E team. By defining the right roles, putting essential standards in place, enabling the platform correctly, and fostering continuous improvement, your organisation can build integrations that are scalable, secure, and cost-effective and you are well on the way to ongoing MuleSoft success.

However, implementing the MuleSoft platform and other C4E Lite components can be challenging for teams who are new to MuleSoft or already stretched thin. This is where Adaptiv can help. Our consultants bring deep MuleSoft expertise and proven frameworks to accelerate your enablement, assess your current platform health, guide best-practice adoption, optimise your licensing and consumption, and uplift your internal capability.

Whether you’re just beginning your MuleSoft journey, preparing for CloudHub 2.0, reviewing your existing implementation, or looking to improve governance and delivery quality, Adaptiv can provide the tailored support you need to confidently move forward and ensure long-term success.