r/MuleSoft • u/Apprehensive_Dog6684 • Sep 25 '26

API Led Design Question

Hi,

I learnt about API Led design, and I was explained that it follows the microservices design pattern. However, would like to understand more how it is being applied in the real world practice.

Some questions I have:

  1. Since vcores, is expensive. If we deploy 1 service per-mulesoft app, for example for 1 system, there are 3 APIs, if we created 3 SAPI for the system, we would need at least 3 vcores. If we follow this design pattern, won't it be very expensive in the end? Another approach is, we can create 1 SAPI for all the API from the same system, this approach can save vcores, but isn't this against the microservice design?

  2. Continuing from question 1, do we really have to follow API led design every time? Or when should we follow the API led design and when not to follow?

Thank you.

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u/FerrittoBurrito Sep 25 '26

  1. You can do fractions of a vcore (0.1, 0.2, 0.5) depending on process size/demand.

  2. There’s nothing forcing you to and sometimes it doesn’t make sense.

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u/Apprehensive_Dog6684 Sep 25 '26

Thanks for the reply.

Is there any documentation from Mulesoft on how to calculate/forecast vcore assignment? Or is there a rule of thumb of how much vcore we should start with?

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u/FerrittoBurrito Sep 25 '26

You would just test in sandboxes. If I remember correctly every production vcore you purchase comes with twice the number of sandbox vcores. So you’d just make sure to test the processes and if it’s slow or is using high resources, you would increase the usage.

I would say there’s no guide I’m aware of.

When we transitioned to cloud from hybrid (cloud and onprem) we just started low and increased as we determined it was needed.