Thread by @Rapid_API

Introduction to API Rate Limiting Factor

The rate-limiting factor plays a crucial role in your API security by controlling an unlimited number of requests in the given period.

Let's talk more about it. 🧵👇🏻

When designing an API, you follow various best practices to ensure your API’s performance and success. Rate-limiting factor in one of them.

The rate-limiting factor is the process through which you limit the amount of traffic coming to your API from a single IP address.

Rate-limiting is essential for security aspects.

Suppose an attacker tries to tank your server by launching a DDoS attack, the rate-limiting will stop addressing the API requests after reaching a certain threshold.

The API rate-limiting also helps to make your API scalable.

Unexpected spikes of traffic will cause lag. But, having rate-limiting will keep your API running for other developers.

There are two types of API rate-limiting:

1️⃣ Key-level Rate Limiting
2️⃣ API-level Rate Limiting

📌 Key-level Rate Limiting

This rate-limiting level focuses on controlling traffic from individual IP addresses to ensure that users do not go above their specified limit.

📌 API-Level Rate Limiting

This rate-limiting type deals with all the traffic coming to the API from all the users. It is to ensure that the overall API rate limit does not exceed.

Methods of API Rate Limiting

Here are three methods you can use for API rate limiting. 👇🏻

1️⃣ Hard Stop

Your API consumers will get an error when they call the API over the limit.

2️⃣ Soft Stop

You can implement a small period where the API calls will continue to succeed after reaching the limit.

You can use this period to let your API consumer know that they may have to subscribe to a new plan.

3️⃣ Throttled Stop

Another thing you can implement is to slow down the response time once the user has reached the limit.

With that being said, this is the end of this thread.

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