API and scalability

App Development
1

Hi code crew,

I am working on a project which will involve interacting with API to load data that I want to display in my app. I have a few questions concerning scalability.

I want to upload a json file (e.g. on GitHub) that my app will fetch data from. I am concerned that as the number of users of my app grows, I will hit some sort of maximum number of requests per minute preventing some users to have access to my file.

  1. is this concern legitimate ? Where can I upload, for free if possible, a json file in a scalable way i.e. such that it can be requested by an arbitrary large number of users per minute ?

Now, I also want to fetch external data. I have not actually found the data source I am going to use yet but most of them enforce a maximum number of requests per minute. Thus, my idea was to automate some process outside of the app that would read the data from the external source and upload it to my scalable location (from question 1). Then, have the app read from the scalable location directly.

  1. Is that a good strategy or should I proceed differently ?

  2. What can I use to automate the task of reading from some API and uploading to a different location ? Can you point me in the right direction ?

Many thanks in advance for your help.
Adrien

2

Hi Adrien,

It is a legitimate concern, however I wouldn’t worry about this (if your JSON is in GitHub) GitHub handles so many requests anyways you’d be fine.

This is a strategy you can use, however those free limits are usually set pretty high. And if you are getting that many requests that you then need to pay for an API, you should definitely monetize your app

This would be some kind of cloud/sever function, you could lookup Firebase cloud functions to do this and store your data (which overall would be a better place to store it than GitHub)

3

Thanks a lot for your reply! I’ll check out Firebase