Securing and Scaling APIs: Integrating API Throttling, Rate Limiting, and API Gateways in Modern Microservices with MuleSoft and Apigee

Abstract

As the modern enterprise is moving toward a microservice-based architecture for developing applications, in many cases offering services over APIs to external parties, such as customers or partners, offering secure and scalable APIs is a top concern for API product managers. APIs must guarantee availability to all, yet need to be protected against abuse, unintentional rampant traffic, and load spirals that can cause slowdowns of the system, subsequently affecting every consumer. The solution to this conflicting but common paradigm is to integrate governance and policy frameworks, basically throttling and rate limiting, to control and protect APIs by offering service quotas on the scale of usage for each consumer. In this project, we create a modern microservice-based application while applying governance to show how these tools can make that easy for an API product manager to secure and scale his APIs.