Reduce Anypoint Costs: Use Shared Flows Instead of System APIs

This document talks about how to use Shared Flows in MuleSoft. Usually in an API-led connectivity architecture, we have 3 layers: Experience APIs, Process APIs, and System APIs. This drives business agility for an organization, but at the same time increases costs in Anypoint Platform. Specifically, we are talking about costs associated with the Cloudhub Workers (Number and Size of vCores). A Cloudhub Worker is a dedicated Mule instance where an API runs. So, the number of workers required by an organization is at least equal, if not greater than the number of APIs in the application network. This number quickly gets multiplied by 3 or more, based on the number of Non-Prod and Prod environments. One way of saving these costs is replacing System APIs (at least the simpler ones) with Shared Flows. We create a Mule project with generalized flows and publish that project to Anypoint Exchange as a Mule-Plugin. Then, we include that Mule-Plugin as a dependency in other Mulesoft APIs and re-u...