This page applies to Apigee and Apigee hybrid.
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Apigee Edge documentation.
To maintain performance and availability across a diverse base of client apps, it's critical to maintain app traffic within the limits of the capacity of your APIs and backend services. It's also important to ensure that apps don't consume more resources than permitted.
Apigee provides two policies that enable you to optimize traffic management to minimize latency for apps while maintaining the health of backend services. Each policy type addresses a distinct aspect of traffic management. In some cases, you might use both policy types in a single API proxy.
SpikeArrest policy
The SpikeArrest policy protects against traffic surges. This policy limits the number of requests processed by an API proxy and sent to a backend, protecting against performance lags and downtime.
This policy should be used to prevent sudden traffic bursts caused by malicious attackers attempting to disrupt a service using a denial-of-service (DOS) attack or by buggy client applications.
See SpikeArrest policy.
Quota policy
This policy enforces consumption limits on client apps by maintaining a distributed 'counter' that tallies incoming requests. The counter can tally API calls for any identifiable entity, including apps, developers, API keys, access tokens, and so on. Usually, API keys are used to identify client apps. This policy is computationally expensive so, for high-traffic APIs, it should configured for longer time intervals, such as a day or month. This policy should be used to enforce business contracts or SLAs with developers and partners, rather than for operational traffic management.
See Quota policy.