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I'm trying to understand 3scale's product. On one of their landing pages they state, "Handling 10’s or 100’s of millions of API calls per day? – No problem. We

I'm trying to understand 3scale's product. On one of their landing pages they state, "Handling 10’s or 100’s of millions of API calls per day? – No problem. We scale 3scale’s management systems so you don’t have to – our infrastructure is highly distributed and scalable on demand for your needs." Now, their architecture diagrams show that that developers directly connect to the API servers. So the origin servers must be scaled out to handle "10's or 100's of millions of API calls per day" anyway. So 3scale provides some kind of external dashboard that you can point an event stream at and get analytics? That is, something like New Relic for APIs? Is that correct?

njyx 14y ago
The infrastructure handles rate limits, access keys, analytics, dev portal, billing etc. for the API but does it out of band. So yes, the traffic does go to the API origin and then control agents there enforce the policies, do the tracking etc. (indeed a bit like New Relic). It's used for some very big APIs but yes, the origin sees the traffic. The system can offload it though - there are agents for Varnish for example which you can sit in front of the app or integration with Akamai, in which case policies are enforced at CDN edge nodes. If the API is handling high volumes you still have to plan for that - but the point here is that the management elements scale with it. You're not stuck with a black box in front of the API which might blow up at inconvenient moments.
- politician 14y ago
  That does sound quite useful; thank you for the explanation.