Dear Architect, we need to talk: It’s Time to Re-think API Consumption Management

The Role of The Architect x Integrations

As a software architect, you’re no stranger to the challenges of integrating external APIs into your company’s applications. It often starts smoothly—connecting an API to bring new business value can be a straightforward task. 

But as time goes on, the landscape changes. APIs introduce breaking changes, experience outages, or struggle with performance during peak traffic. 

Meanwhile, your own demands evolve—whether it’s scaling up API call volumes or navigating the frustrations of provider rate limits.

Over time, a pattern emerges. You notice your R&D teams are investing increasing amounts of time and effort just to maintain existing API integrations.

How much time? We recently surveyed 200 companies to find out exactly that—take a look. 

While there is so much on your plate, as an architect, it’s your job to step back and ask, “where can we optimize?” From an architectural standpoint, you have a couple of options.

A developer mindset might lead you to move fast, patch problems in code, or lean on existing frameworks to handle issues like rate limits. Relying on an API provider’s official SDK could be a quick and low-effort solution.

But with an architect’s mindset, you’re likely thinking bigger. You see the need for an architectural solution that manages API traffic more comprehensively—something that offers real-time visibility and insights into API consumption, enforces proper governance, and allows you to exert active control when needed. In other words, you’re envisioning an API consumption gateway.

Let me share a few key reasons why an API consumption gateway should be part of your architectural strategy.

The Role of the API Gateway in Modern Application Architecture

Think of an API consumption gateway as a traffic cop for your outgoing API traffic. 

It sits between your application and external APIs, providing a layer of visibility, control, and protection. This gateway:

• Deep level visibility: It collects metrics and logs about your API traffic, giving you insights into usage patterns, performance, and potential issues.
• Best practice remediation  policies: You can define rules to manage traffic flow, such as caching, retrying failed requests, rate limiting, and queuing.
• Decouples concerns: The gateway handles API-related middleware logic, freeing your application from these responsibilities and making it more maintainable.

Consumption management, on the other hand, refers to the broader platform that includes the API consumption gateway and a control plane for managing policies, auditing actions, and viewing your catalog of consumed APIs. It's a centralized approach to governing your API traffic.

Essentially, an API consumption gateway and consumption management provide a robust solution for ensuring that your application's interactions with external APIs are efficient, reliable, and secure.

Here’s are a few examples of companies that implement this kind of solution as they grow in scale:

1. TravelTech Companies: These businesses aggregate data from multiple APIs to offer real-time travel options. As they grow, managing and optimizing API interactions becomes essential to maintain speed and reliability.
2. iPaaS Providers: Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) companies rely on numerous API integrations for their low-code/no-code offerings. As their usage scales, an API consumption management solution helps streamline operations and enforce governance.
3. Cloud Security Firms: These companies make numerous API calls to deliver threat analysis for cloud and SaaS applications. Scaling up requires a robust API management strategy to ensure security and reliability.

One step ahead of the game for Architects

As engineering leaders, we've spent years building and refining solutions that manage and optimize API consumption. It’s a space that often gets overlooked until a crisis hits—when API costs skyrocket, or worse, when your critical services go down because an external API failed. As architects, you’re tasked with thinking ahead, managing resources efficiently, and planning for resilience. And in today’s API-driven world, it’s time we start treating our external APIs with the same level of importance as other engineering resources.

Your APIs Are a Resource—Manage Them Like One

When you think about the way you manage containers, you’ve likely got an orchestration and management solution in place, such as Kubernetes. Similarly, the APIs you expose to customers are probably managed through an API gateway. Your databases? You’ve got robust systems to manage those too.

Now, consider your external APIs. Are you treating them as a critical resource? In many organizations, the answer is no. External APIs often lack proper management and optimization. Yet, these APIs are just as critical as the ones you expose. They power your applications, feed your systems with data, and often carry business-critical functions.

Without a management solution, you’re flying blind. You wouldn’t run your containers without orchestration, so why would you neglect the APIs you rely on daily? It’s time to start treating your external APIs with the same caution and strategic thought as you do with your other resources.

Because You’re Obsessed with Resilience, Security, Cost, and Efficiency

That’s what you do as an architect. You’re constantly thinking about how to make systems resilient, secure, cost-effective, and efficient. These are non-negotiable elements of good architecture.

When it comes to API integrations, the same principles apply. How do you ensure your security policies are aligned across all integrations? How do you build resilience into these integrations, so they continue to function even when the unexpected happens? And how do you manage the costs associated with API consumption?

An API consumption management solution gives you visibility and control. It allows you to enforce security policies, build in resilience mechanisms, and optimize costs. Developers might focus on getting the API to work, but as an architect, your role is to ensure it works efficiently, securely, and without breaking the bank.

But What If It Doesn’t Impose a Single Point of Failure?

At this point, you might be thinking, “If I route all traffic through a gateway, am I not creating a single point of failure?” It’s a valid concern.

The key is to design your API consumption management solution with resilience in mind. Make sure your gateways can scale up or down based on demand. Implement failover mechanisms so that if one gateway fails, another can take over. And have a failsafe mechanism that can tunnel traffic directly to the API if the gateway doesn’t respond.Another crucial aspect is latency - you need to make sure that no significant latency will be added to your upstream API calls (how much is insignificant - we’ll based on our knowledge, less than 5ms is extremely efficient)

These are challenges we’ve been addressing since day one. It’s about building a solution that not only manages your APIs but does so in a way that adds resilience rather than vulnerability.

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Because You’re Planning for the Future

As an architect, you’re always looking ahead. You know that the APIs your organization consumes today are only going to become more critical over time. The demand for these APIs is set to skyrocket, particularly as your organization begins to implement AI capabilities. In fact, the global AI market is projected to reach $740 billion by 2030, with AI APIs becoming a fundamental part of this growth​ (Ringover).

Moreover, API usage is already exploding across industries. For example, Postman reported that the number of API requests on its platform reached 4.7 billion in 2019 alone, with continued exponential growth since then​ (Postman Blog). This surge in API consumption underscores the necessity for strategic management to ensure your architecture is ready not just for today’s demands, but for the future’s as well.

Planning for the future means thinking strategically about how you manage these APIs. It’s about ensuring that your architecture is prepared to handle the increasing complexity and scale that comes with the growing reliance on AI and other advanced technologies. That’s the difference between a developer mindset and an architect mindset. Developers solve the problem in front of them; architects plan for what’s coming down the road.

Because You Might Have Thought About Building One—But Why Would You?

Finally, if you’re still reading, you’ve probably thought about building an API consumption management solution yourself. Maybe you’ve even started working on one.

But why would you? Maintaining API integrations is a headache, and one that’s worth outsourcing. Sure, your organization could build a solution, but think about the ongoing maintenance, the updates, the scaling—these are non-trivial challenges.

This is where the build vs. buy decision comes into play. Just as you’ve opted for production-grade, modular solutions in other areas, the same logic applies here. An API consumption management solution that’s ready for production, customizable to your needs, and maintained by experts is worth the investment.

To Conclude

Thinking of a mediation layer between your production environment and third-party APIs is more than just a mindset shift; it’s a strategic move that leverages the architecture tools you already have in place. The good news is, you’re not alone in this journey. We’ve spoken with numerous enterprise and top-tier tech companies, and a common thread among these high-performing engineering teams is that they’ve considered—and often implemented—such a gateway.

Because this isn’t yet an officially recognized market category, you’ll hear it called by many names: egress proxy, forward-proxy, outbound API traffic service, reverse API gateway, and more. But they all refer to the same concept—a dedicated infrastructure component that routes outgoing API traffic, providing essential controls and visibility for your engineering organization.

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Interested in learning more about what it means to have an API Consumption Management solution in place? You’re in the right place. We’d be happy to point you to additional reading materials, such as The Evolution of Building API Middleware and The Build vs. Buy Dilemma, or schedule a call with our team.

We’d love to hear more about your specific needs and help you plan for a resilient, efficient future.

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