Optimizing API Gateway Strategies: Balancing Action-Based Pricing and Architectural Clarity
As businesses increasingly rely on API gateways for their microservice architectures, choosing the right approach to endpoint design becomes crucial—especially when faced with unconventional pricing models. Recently, I’ve been exploring this topic and would like to share some insights, seeking feedback from the community.
Understanding the Landscape
In my current project, we’re evaluating various API gateway providers. One notable consideration is their billing model: charges are calculated based on the number of “actions” or “endpoints” predefined in the system.
Our existing backend architecture features controllers such as WidgetsController, encompassing typical CRUD actions like CreateWidget, GetWidgets, UpdateWidget, and DeleteWidget. Additionally, we’ve implemented specialized actions tailored to specific business needs, for example, GetWidgetsForUseCase1 and GetWidgetsForUseCase2. These are designed to encapsulate particular logic flows, ensuring clarity and separation of concerns.
It’s important to note that our codebase emphasizes DRY principles—shared logic resides within service layers and is reused across actions where appropriate. The differentiated actions mainly serve organizational clarity rather than redundancy.
Vendor Recommendations and Concerns
The API gateway provider encourages us to streamline our endpoints—reducing multiple narrowly focused actions into fewer, more versatile endpoints by leveraging parameters or flags to modify behavior. They also suggest their own tooling to manage this complexity at the gateway level.
While this approach might reduce the number of endpoints, I’m skeptical about whether it truly benefits our architecture. It appears more motivated by cost incentives—potentially leading to vendor lock-in—rather than delivering tangible architectural advantages.
The Future of Our API Design
Adding to the complexity, we’re considering introducing new endpoints that would return significantly different response structures depending on the request parameters. This raises a key question: Should we aim to design highly flexible, multifunctional endpoints, or maintain narrowly scoped, purpose-driven ones for clarity?
Key Question
From an architectural standpoint, is there a tangible advantage—performance-wise or maintainability-wise—to consolidating multiple specific actions into a single, flexible endpoint? Or does it generally enhance clarity to keep endpoints focused and simple, even if that means increasing their count?
Seeking Community Insights
I’m eager to hear experiences from others—particularly those who have navigated similar pricing models or large-scale API design challenges involving numerous specialized endpoints. How did you strike the balance between architectural clarity, performance, and
