Optimizing API Gateway Strategies: Navigating Action-Based Pricing and Architectural Design
As many organizations venture into building scalable and efficient APIs, one challenge that often arises is choosing the right approach for designing endpoints—especially when faced with vendor pricing models that charge based on “actions” or “endpoints.” This article explores the considerations around consolidating multiple API actions into fewer endpoints versus maintaining narrowly scoped, separate endpoints.
Understanding the Context
In modern backend architectures, it’s common to organize controllers with specific actions such as CreateWidget, GetWidgets, UpdateWidget, and DeleteWidget. Sometimes, developers create specialized actions tailored to particular use cases, like GetWidgetsForUseCase1 and GetWidgetsForUseCase2. These distinctions often aim to clarify business logic and maintain clear separation of concerns at the controller level.
However, to promote code reuse, shared logic is typically encapsulated in service layers, avoiding unnecessary duplication. The primary purpose of defining multiple actions is to improve code readability and maintainability rather than to handle fundamentally different logic—though this can vary based on specific requirements.
Vendor Pricing Models: A New Consideration
When evaluating API gateway providers, some vendors introduce pricing schemes based on the number of “actions” or “endpoints.” This raises questions about architectural choices: should teams consolidate multiple narrowly defined actions into a single, more versatile endpoint? Vendors often recommend combining several operations into one endpoint using parameters or flags to dictate behavior.
While this approach can reduce the number of endpoints and potentially lower costs, it also introduces increased complexity within each endpoint. Such complexity might lead to less maintainable code, harder debugging, and more intricate response handling, especially if responses vary significantly depending on input parameters.
The Core Question: Balance and Best Practices
This leads to a critical question for API designers:
Is merging multiple specific actions into a single, dynamic endpoint advantageous from an architectural and performance perspective? Or does maintaining separate, focused endpoints typically yield clearer, more maintainable code—even if it results in a higher number of endpoints?
Key considerations include:
- Maintainability: Focused endpoints are generally easier to understand, test, and modify.
- Performance: Depending on the implementation, consolidating actions might introduce conditional logic that impacts response times.
- Scalability: More endpoints can mean more granularity for scaling; fewer endpoints may simplify overall management but risk creating complex monolithic handlers.
- Cost Implications: Vendor pricing based on action count may incentivize consolidation
