Co-Founder Taliferro
Introduction
API policies are a critical part of API management. They help protect your API, ensure traffic is handled correctly, and keep customers happy. Below I will cover the different types of policies available and how they can be used.
Rate Limiting Policy
Rate limiting controls the number of requests that can be made to your API in a given time period. For example, if you have an API that allows users to create orders, and those orders need to be processed by someone in your company before they can be shipped out, then you probably want to enforce some rate limits on this particular action. If a user is allowed to place 50 orders per hour, but only ten people are working on processing them, those 50 orders will likely not get processed until the next hour has passed.
To keep your code running efficiently and optimally, you must implement rate-limiting policies when building new features or adding new functionality within existing ones (e.g., increasing order limits). In addition to keeping things running smoothly during peak periods of traffic (like Black Friday), implementing these policies helps ensure that systems aren't bogged down by automated scripts trying to shove as many requests through their APIs as possible. This scenario leads us nicely into our next section:
Traffic Management Policy
Traffic management policies are used to control the amount of traffic that can be sent to an API. When a policy is set up at the account level, it applies to all APIs in your account (unless you override it at the API level). This is important because APIs have limits on how many requests they can handle, and if these limits are exceeded, your API may stop working or become unstable.
When setting up traffic management policies, keep in mind that some limit request rates based on a per-second basis (for example, 50 requests/s) while others limit request rates based on a per-minute basis (for example, 300 requests/min).
Along with limiting request rates, there are other things you can do with traffic management policies, such as setting up quotas or allowing only specific IP addresses access through whitelisting them or blacklisting others.
Mediation Policy
Mediation is sending traffic to two or more endpoints and then having those endpoints share the load. This allows you to achieve multiple goals simultaneously, including rate limiting, traffic management, and content delivery network (CDN) functionality.
Analytics and API Monitoring Policy
Monitoring and analytics are two different things. analytics is about understanding your data. Monitoring is about understanding your performance.
The goal of an API monitoring policy is to collect data on the performance of your API, so you can understand where it's going wrong and improve it over time.
API Policies will help you manage your API traffic, security, and customer-facing QoS.
As a provider of APIs, you must manage traffic, security, and QoS. API policies can help you control access to your APIs, enforce rate limits, and mediate traffic.
Conclusion
This post has explained what API policies are and how you can use them to manage your API traffic. There are a few different types of policies that I've discussed, but they all have the same goal: to make sure your customers (and other developers) have a good experience when using your APIs.
Tyrone Showers