Designing APIs that scale requires thinking about both architecture and operations. In this article we cover the practical patterns we use at PRISMADOT to build resilient, performant APIs.
Key Principles
- Statelessness: Keep endpoints stateless so requests can be routed and scaled easily.
- Pagination & Filtering: Avoid returning huge payloads by supporting cursor or offset-based pagination.
- Rate Limiting: Protect services and provide fair usage across clients.
- Efficient Data Access: Use selective fields, caching, and optimized DB queries.
Operational Tips
- Use a robust monitoring and tracing setup (e.g., Prometheus + Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
- Automate deployments with CI/CD and use blue-green or canary releases for safe rollouts.
- Introduce a CDN or edge caching for expensive read-heavy endpoints.
By combining these design choices with good observability and testing, you can build APIs that handle growth while remaining maintainable.
If you want, we can create a follow-up post showing a sample Node/Go implementation with benchmarks and caching strategies.