Rate limits

Understand automation rate limits and how to design around them.

Rate limits keep shared infrastructure healthy. Treat them as part of your design—not surprises—when you connect automation to external APIs or run fan-out jobs across many tenants.

Defaults

Limits protect shared infrastructure. Burst allowances exist for short spikes, but sustained traffic above quota will throttle or fail requests—often with 429 responses you must handle.

Headers

Many APIs return Retry-After or rate-limit headers. Log them during integration testing so your backoff code respects server hints instead of guessing.

Strategies

• Batch work where possible—one request with twenty IDs beats twenty serial requests.
• Queue externally when needed so spikes flatten into steady throughput.
• Shed load with sampling under stress: process every Nth event until pressure drops.

Tenant fairness

Multi-tenant systems sometimes enforce per-tenant caps. Coordinate with platform admins if one customer’s automation crowds others.

Monitoring

Graph throttle events to spot hot workflows early. Alert when throttle rates exceed a baseline for more than a few minutes—often the first sign of an infinite loop or misconfigured poll interval.

Capacity planning

Before launch week, rehearse peak traffic with load tests against staging. Compare observed QPS to your quotas and pad headroom for retries.