Rate Limiters

Rate limiters are used to control the rate (count/period) of requests or connections sent or received from a network. For instance, if you are using a virtual service that is configured to allow 1000 connections/ second and if the number of connections you make exceeds that limit, then a rate limiting action will be triggered. You can configure this rate limiting action. The rate limits allow a better flow of data and increases security by mitigating attacks such as DDoS.

Controlling Rate Limiter

The following are the parameters to control the rate limiter:

Count

It is the rate at which the token is generated. A token is consumed every time a connection/request lands on the virtual service. If there is no token, then you can trigger the rate limiting action.

Burst Size

It is the maximum number of tokens that can be held by the virtual service at any given time.

Period

It is the time period on which the rate limiting will be performed. In the above example, it is 1000 connections/ second. You can configure the period to a different value other than one second.

Classifying the Rate Limiter

The following are the types of rate limiters based on the use case:

• Static Rate Limiter

  • Virtual Service Connection Rate Limiter

  • Network Security Rate Limiter

  • DNS policy Rate Limiter

• Dynamic Rate Limiter

  • Application Profile Rate Limiter

  • DataScript Rate Limiter