Optimizing API Gateway Strategies: Navigating Action-Based Pricing and Design Considerations
In today’s API-driven landscape, selecting the right gateway solution is crucial for both performance and cost management. Recently, I’ve been exploring various API gateway providers and encountered a common concern: their pricing models are based on the number of “actions” or “endpoints” exposed.
The Context: Designing Your API Endpoints
In our current backend architecture, we utilize controllers such as WidgetsController that encompass standard actions like CreateWidget, GetWidgets, UpdateWidget, and DeleteWidget. Additionally, we sometimes define specialized actions tailored to particular use cases, for example, GetWidgetsForUseCase1 and GetWidgetsForUseCase2. These specialized endpoints are designed to serve specific contexts with clarity, aligning with principles of separation of concerns, not to duplicate logic.
Our backend codebase adheres to the DRY philosophy — shared logic is centralized within service layers, while controllers mainly handle routing and context-specific behavior. This setup ensures maintainability and readability.
The Vendor’s Proposal: Endpoint Consolidation
The API gateway provider suggested reducing the number of endpoints by aggregating similar actions and utilizing flags or parameters to modify behavior. They promote tools at the gateway level to handle conditional logic, aiming to streamline the API surface.
While this approach might seem efficient architecturally, it raises questions about potential trade-offs:
– Does consolidating multiple actions into a single, more complex endpoint improve performance?
– Will it complicate client implementations and increase response handling complexity?
– Is this strategy driven by genuine architectural benefits or primarily motivated by pricing considerations?
The Pricing Dilemma
A significant factor in this discussion is the provider’s action-based pricing. More endpoints equate to higher costs, incentivizing fewer, broader endpoints. This could also lead toward vendor lock-in, limiting flexibility and surpassing optimal architectural practices.
Future Considerations: Expanding Functionality
There’s ongoing internal debate about introducing new actions that return vastly different response structures based on request parameters. This escalation complicates the design further, prompting questions about the ideal balance between endpoint specificity and flexibility.
Key Question for the Community
From a best-practices perspective, is there a tangible advantage — in terms of architecture or performance — to consolidating multiple narrowly tailored actions into a single, more sophisticated endpoint? Or does maintaining focused, purpose-driven endpoints generally lead to more maintainable and scalable API designs?
If you’ve faced
