Evaluating API Gateway Strategies: Balancing Endpoint Granularity and Cost Considerations

In the world of API design and management, choosing the right approach to structuring your endpoints and understanding cost implications can be complex. Today, I want to share insights on a common dilemma faced by developers and architects when selecting API gateway solutions—specifically, concerns surrounding “action-based” pricing models.

Understanding the Context

Many organizations operate with a set of RESTful controllers, where each controller manages resources with clearly defined actions—such as creating, retrieving, updating, or deleting entities. For example, a WidgetsController might have actions like CreateWidget, GetWidgets, UpdateWidget, and DeleteWidget.

In some cases, teams define more granular, use-case specific actions—say, GetWidgetsForUseCase1 and GetWidgetsForUseCase2—to encapsulate distinct business logic pathways. This practice can promote clarity and separation of concerns, especially when different use cases require tailored processing, even if the underlying data sharing is maintained at the service layer.

Vendor Pricing Models and Architectural Trade-offs

Certain API gateway providers implement billing based on the number of “actions” or “endpoints.” This approach can motivate organizations to consolidate multiple narrowly scoped actions into fewer, more versatile endpoints. They often suggest using flags, parameters, or internal routing logic to handle multiple behaviors within a single endpoint, leveraging their platform’s capabilities to manage complexity.

While this might seem attractive from a cost perspective, it raises important architectural questions. Is it beneficial—for performance, maintainability, or clarity—to merge several specific actions into one complex endpoint? Or does this approach complicate your codebase and obscure the API’s intent?

The debate becomes even more pertinent when considering future expansions. For example, planning to add new actions that return significantly different payloads depending on the request demands careful thought about endpoint design—more focused, narrowly defined endpoints often provide cleaner, more maintainable solutions.

Key Considerations

• Clarity and Maintainability: Focused endpoints tend to be easier to document, test, and understand, reducing potential bugs and onboarding costs.

• Performance: While consolidating endpoints can reduce the number of network calls, complex internal logic may impact response times, especially if not carefully optimized.

• Flexibility and Evolution: Modular, specific endpoints typically support easier evolution and extensions, whereas overly generic endpoints can become unwieldy as complexity grows.

• Cost Implications