Why throttle limit with API gateway for traffic surge?

[svj]

One of the practice test has questions related to traffic surge for serverless applications with API gateway.

Suppose a company is expecting huge traffic surge for some product offers, why would one want to throttle traffic? That would limit the growth of the company in terms of business orders right?

Since serverless applications can scale automatically at large, why throttle?

[Carlo-TutorialsDojo]

Hello svj,

Thanks for your feedback.

Throttling is used to prevent your backend resources, not API Gateway per se, from becoming overwhelmed in the event of a traffic surge. Any API must have throttling in place. Without throttling, you risk your API being abused by anyone, which could result in a variety of issues, the most serious of which, of course, is performance degradation.

Let me know if this answers your question.

Regards,

Carlo @ Tutorials Dojo

[Venkat Somireddy]

If the company knows ahead of the time for a surge in traffic(which in this case it does), API throttling is a poor solution. On the other hand, if there is a sudden spike and company did not expect, throttling would limit the load on backend application. I disagree with the your response. The question should be framed differently if throttling is the answer.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by  Venkat Somireddy.

[Carlo-TutorialsDojo]

Hello Venkat,

Throttling is a staple when it comes to building APIs so I don’t see why it would be a poor solution. Whether you’re expecting a traffic surge or not, or even if you do know the exact time of when it will happen, it’s unclear how big of an impact it will have on your resources. Your computing resources are finite. Yes, you can put all scaling techniques in place but there is always the possibility that they will be exhausted (even Lambda has its own limitations) eventually. Throttling will ensure or at least help that you always maintain a consistent performance that you expect on your backend.

Regards,

Carlo @ Tutorials Dojo

• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by  Carlo-TutorialsDojo.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by  Carlo-TutorialsDojo.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 10 months ago by  Carlo-TutorialsDojo.