How nuanced rate limiting transforms your API and business

Rate limiting can transform an API in nuanced ways beyond just blocking potential floods of incoming requests. It can improve availability, UX, fairness, and internal development velocity when implemented with the nuance of a natural rivershed rather than a binary dam-like approach. This involves creating sophisticated security policies that account for variables like authentication state, request values, location, and more to protect against advanced attacks and fraudulent usage. Nuanced protection against accidents can be achieved by implementing catch-all rate-limiting policies for general protection, as well as subtle limits to protect from mistakes from known entities. Rate limiting can also lead to performance gains when deployed correctly, with the ability to claw back latency based on how the API gateway is designed and where its algorithms are run. Additionally, nuanced pricing and go-to-market strategies can be enabled through usage-based billing, while UX improvements can be achieved through nuanced rate-limiting policies that filter requests based on user behavior, location, and other factors. In multitenant systems, fairness requires sophisticated rate-limiting policies that account for every possible shred of data attached to requests. Finally, a developer-friendly implementation of rate limiting can improve the internal developer experience by providing flexibility, familiarity, environmental flexibility, GitOps-readiness, and centralization. By layering in nuance into rate-limiting practices, businesses can enrich their API's ecosystem for both their business and every user downstream.