Crack the system design question with confidence.

Ace Your System Design Interview: The Ultimate Guide to API Rate Limiting

Learn how to design scalable, secure, and efficient API rate limiting strategies with real-world insights, practical examples, and trade-offs — so you’re always interview-ready.

You’re sitting in a system design interview, and the interviewer give you a scenario.

“Imagine you’re working at a company that offers a public API.
Suddenly, the traffic spikes — some users are sending thousands of requests per second, overwhelming your servers, and causing legitimate users to experience slowdowns.

How would you design a system to prevent this abuse while ensuring fair access to all users?”

Alright, let’s break the solution to this….

Why Rate Limiting?

APIs are finite resources.

No matter how powerful your infrastructure, you have limits — compute power, database connections, bandwidth.

Without controls, a single bad actor (intentional or not) can degrade or even take down your system.

Rate limiting ensures:

• Fair usage: Prevents one user from monopolizing resources.