The Developer’s Guide to Building Scalable APIs in 2024
Building an API that scales from 100 to 10 million requests per day requires careful architectural decisions from day one. Here’s what we’ve learned from building production APIs across dozens of high-traffic projects.
Design for Change
Use versioning from day one. Adopt RESTful conventions consistently or commit fully to GraphQL. Document with OpenAPI. These decisions seem trivial at 100 users and critical at 100,000.
Rate Limiting & Caching
Without rate limiting, a single bad actor can bring down your API. Implement token bucket or sliding window algorithms, and cache aggressively at every layer.
