Web API Acceleration and Anti-Abuse Protection
REST, GraphQL and webhook traffic is dynamic — you cannot cache your way out of it. We remove handshakes and cross-border round trips at the edge, then rate limit, fingerprint and block the callers your backend should never have to answer.
Get an API plan- 0-RTTTLS 1.3 session resumption
- 3,000+Global edge PoPs
- 7T+DDoS mitigation capacity
Four failure modes specific to public APIs
API traffic is dynamic by definition, so every extra round trip on the path and every missing dimension in your rate limits shows up on the very first call.
Round trips you cannot cache away
A call from Singapore or Frankfurt to a single-region origin spends three or four round trips on DNS, TCP and TLS before any JSON moves. Chain five sequential calls at app launch and the user just watches a spinner.
Bursts take the backend down first
One push notification, one flash sale, or one partner whose retries have no backoff, and QPS jumps tenfold. Thread pools and database connections exhaust first, and unrelated endpoints start returning 502.
Competitors harvesting your data
Pricing, inventory and listing endpoints get pulled in full every hour from rotating residential proxies — tens of millions of calls a day. You pay the bandwidth and the database load to populate someone else’s comparison page.
Credential stuffing hidden in normal traffic
Login, OTP and voucher endpoints are probed slowly from thousands of addresses, each staying just under your per-IP threshold. Dashboards look calm right up to the point where accounts are taken over in bulk.
Six core capabilities
Routing and API security run on one network, so there is no extra vendor to chain in front of your gateway and no additional forwarding hop.
Smart routing for dynamic calls
Uncacheable requests travel our private backbone, using 300+ PNIs and 14 Tier-1 providers to route around congestion instead of accepting whatever BGP hands you.
TLS offload and connection reuse
TLS 1.3 terminates at the edge with 0-RTT resumption, while pooled keep-alive connections and HTTP/2 multiplexing carry traffic to origin — the biggest single win for small, chatty JSON calls.
Fine-grained rate limiting
Set QPS, concurrency and daily quotas by API key, token, IP, user agent, path or any combination. Over-limit callers can be queued, slowed, challenged or answered with 429 — without touching other tenants.
Bot defence and abuse control
TLS fingerprints, request cadence and IP reputation separate your own SDK and search crawlers from scrapers, while behavioural models surface low-and-slow credential stuffing.
L3–L7 scrubbing and origin shielding
Terabit capacity absorbs SYN and HTTP floods at the edge, and fetch authentication with network allow-listing keeps your API gateway off the public internet entirely.
Canary releases and version routing
Split traffic to v1, v2 or canary clusters by header, cookie, geography or weight, all at the edge. A single GraphQL endpoint can still be policed per operationName.
Four steps to go live, no code changes
Cutover and rollback are both a DNS change. Your auth logic, your SDK and your callers never need to ship a release.
Onboard the API hostname
Point api.example.com at the edge, issue or upload a certificate, and enable HTTP/2, HTTP/3 or WebSocket fetch as needed.
Group your endpoints
Split by path prefix into public read, authenticated write and authentication groups, each with its own cache, rate limit and protection level.
Run in observe mode
Log without blocking first, calibrating thresholds and allow-lists against real traffic so your own SDK and partner callbacks are never caught.
Enforce and tune
Switch to enforcement, then iterate on live logs, top-caller reports and 429 rates — every block traces back to a specific request.
Typical results after onboarding
Ranges observed across API customers; actual results depend on endpoint mix, authentication model and where your callers are.
- 40%+Lower cross-border round-trip time
- 90%+Automated scraping identified
- 10×Burst headroom
- 99.99%API availability
Web API acceleration and protection FAQ
Start at the edge: cap QPS and daily volume per API key or token, and answer over-limit callers with 429 plus Retry-After. For anonymous traffic, tighten by IP range and request fingerprint. Most abuse stops at those two steps. Then move the targeted endpoint into its own group with its own thresholds, so hardening it does not throttle the rest of your API.
Yes. API latency is dominated by round trips, not payload size. Callers connect to a nearby edge PoP, TLS terminates there with session resumption, and the fetch to origin takes an optimised backbone path. In practice that removes 30–50% of cross-border round-trip time, and the smaller and chattier your calls, the larger the gain.
Use both, in layers. Authenticated traffic should be limited per API key or user ID — accurate, and immune to a whole office sharing one NAT address. Anonymous traffic falls back to IP plus request fingerprint. Run observe mode for a week or two, set thresholds from your real p99 call rates, and allow-list your own apps, partners and search crawlers before enforcing.
By operation rather than by URL. Persisted queries can be cached at the edge by query hash for read-only operations, while mutations get their own rate limits. We also recommend capping query depth and complexity so a single deeply nested query cannot exhaust your database — a GraphQL-specific risk that generic WAF rules will not catch.
No. Search engine crawlers are verified by reverse DNS and allowed through, and partners are allow-listed by API key or source IP. Everything else is judged on TLS fingerprint, header ordering, request cadence and whether related resources are ever fetched — real clients and official SDKs behave nothing like harvesting scripts. Policies can also throttle before they block.
No. Authorization headers, custom headers and request bodies pass through unmodified, so anything your signature covers stays intact; if the signature includes the client IP, read it from X-Forwarded-For. Outbound webhooks can be routed through us as well, with retries, timeouts and failure alerting handled at the edge instead of in your application code.
Still haven't found what you're looking for? Talk to our team.
Make every API call fast — and every abusive one expensive
Send us your endpoint list, where your callers are and the abuse or latency you are seeing today, and we will come back with a rate limiting, routing and protection configuration.