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jacky_mish's avatar
jacky_mish
Contributor
3 years ago

Bounded API calls

I have been seeing something in industry where clients are bounding their api calls and then fetching the rest later if people want more info (one example is Instagram now only fetching and displaying the last 6 pictures a user has posted)

What is the downside of sending an unbounded extremely long JSON blob and just rendering everything asynchronously vs bounding these API calls and making more calls to the api.

I’m sure that caching and storage comes into play here too but would love to hear about any specific case study / latency improvements / numbers that someone could share about sending long json blobs vs bounding api calls and responses.

  • scenario involves a fairly complicated domain. Some of the business concerns include scheduling drones, tracking packages, managing user accounts, and storing and analyzing historical data. Moreover,  get to market quickly and then iterate quickly, adding new functionality and capabilities. The application needs to operate at cloud scale, with a high service level objective (SLO).  different parts of the system will have very different requirements for data storage and querying. All of these considerations lead  to choose a microservices architecture for the Drone Delivery application.