Document updated on Nov 1, 2023

API Throttling Guide: Control Traffic & Prevent Abuse

KrakenD offers several ways to protect the usage of your infrastructure that might act at very different levels.

The most significant type of traffic management feature is the rate limit, which allows you to throttle the traffic of end-users or the traffic of KrakenD against your backend services. The rate limits mainly cover the following purposes:

• Avoid stressing or flooding your backend services with massive requests (proxy rate limit)
• Establish a quota of usage for your exposed API (router rate limit)
• Create a simple QoS strategy for your API

In addition to rate-limiting, which is the most obvious functionality, when we talk about Traffic Management and API Throttling, KrakenD covers:

• Circuit Breaker: An automatic protection measure for your stack and avoids cascade failures.
• Rate-limiting, which has many variants:
  • Tiered Rate Limiting (stateless) Enterprise : Sets the maximum throughtput users can send depending on their tier/plan.
  • Service Rate Limiting (stateless) Enterprise : Sets the maximum throughput users can have to a KrakenD instance.
  • Redis-based global rate limit (stateful) Enterprise : Sets the maximum throughput users can have on a KrakenD cluster, backed on Redis.
  • Endpoint Rate Limiting: Sets the maximum throughput all connected users can have against specific endpoints (stateless).
  • Client Rate Limiting: Sets the maximum throughput each end-user has to specific endpoints (stateless).
  • Proxy Rate Limiting: Sets the maximum throughput KrakenD can have between an endpoint and your backend services (stateless).
• Spike Arrest: Ensures a minimum time between different requests goes by
• Service Discovery: To detect and locate services automatically on your enterprise network.
• Bot detection: Reject bots carrying out scraping, content theft, and other forms of spam.
• Geofencing Enterprise : With a combination of the GeoIP integration and Security Policies you can restrict usage based on country/city.
• IPFiltering Enterprise to block traffic from undesired IPs.

In KrakenD you can combine parts or all the traffic management features.

Contribute to KrakenD Documentation. Improve this page »