Performance is the experience of how fast and consistently an API responds under real-world conditions. Latency, throughput, and predictability directly shape how consumers perceive an API and whether they trust it for important work. A slow or erratic API pushes developers toward workarounds, caching layers, and eventually competitors. I think of performance as a feature that consumers feel on every single request. It is easy to ignore when traffic is low and painful to fix once an API is embedded in critical paths, so I would rather measure and design for it from the start. Consistent performance is one of the quiet ways an API earns long-term trust.
Performance
Policies
Caching Strategy Defined
Every API should define a caching strategy and express it through explicit Cache-Control headers on responses that can safely be reused. I require that providers decide, per operation, what is cach...
Batch Operations (Design)
Require that APIs handling high volumes of records offer explicit batch operations rather than forcing consumers to hammer single-resource endpoints in a loop. Every API must define clear semantics...
Caching (Operations)
Require that every read-heavy API sets explicit HTTP caching headers, so I want Cache-Control, ETag, and Last-Modified in play with sensible max-age and validation behavior spelled out in the contr...
Filtering & Sorting (Operations)
Require that collection endpoints offer consistent, documented filtering and sorting, so I want a shared convention for query parameters, allowed fields, operators, and sort order applied the same ...
Monitoring (Operations)
Require that every API is actively monitored for availability, latency, error rates, and traffic, so I want the golden signals collected, dashboarded, and wired to alerts before an API ever reaches...
Pagination (Operations)
Require that every endpoint returning a collection paginates its results using a single, consistent strategy, so I want a documented approach, whether cursor or offset, with clear page-size limits ...
Rate Limiting (Operations)
Require that every API enforces rate limits and communicates them clearly, so I want defined quotas per consumer, standard headers that report remaining budget, and a proper 429 with a Retry-After ...
Performance Budgets Defined
Require that every API define performance budgets, setting explicit targets for latency, throughput, and error rates that it commits to holding. I expect these budgets to be measured continuously a...
Strategies
APIs Are Fast and Efficient
I want our APIs to be fast and efficient by design, because performance is a feature that consumers feel on every single call. That means a deliberate caching strategy so we are not recomputing or ...
APIs Are Observable and Monitored
All APIs must have comprehensive observability including monitoring, logging, health checks, and alerting, with defined SLIs and SLOs that ensure teams can proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve...
APIs Are Protected from Abuse and Misuse
All APIs must have abuse prevention mechanisms beyond basic rate limiting, including throttling, quotas, circuit breakers, and bot detection, ensuring the stability and availability of APIs for leg...
APIs Have Clear Service Level Commitments
All production APIs must have defined service level agreements (SLAs) that specify uptime, availability, latency, and throughput commitments for each plan tier, providing consumers with the confide...
APIs Scale Efficiently Under Load
All APIs must be designed to scale efficiently as consumer traffic and data volumes grow, employing caching, pagination, filtering, and batch operations to ensure consistent performance and avoid d...
