🚦 Rate Limiting — Keeping Your System Fair

Rate limiting is about controlling how often users or services can access your APIs or resources. It protects your system from abuse, ensures fair usage, and helps maintain performance.

🛡️ Why Rate Limit?

• Prevent Abuse: Stop malicious actors from overwhelming your system.
• Fair Usage: Ensure all users get a fair share of resources.
• Protect Downstream Services: Avoid cascading failures.

🧰 Common Techniques

• Token Bucket: Users get tokens at a fixed rate; each request consumes a token.
• Leaky Bucket: Requests are processed at a steady rate, excess is queued or dropped.
• Fixed Window: Count requests in a fixed time window (e.g., 100/minute).
• Sliding Window: More accurate, counts requests in a rolling window.

🏗️ Where to Apply?

• API Gateways
• Load Balancers
• Application Servers

🧠 Final Thoughts

Rate limiting is essential for robust, scalable systems. Choose the right algorithm based on your needs and always communicate limits to your users.