Landscape of API Traffic

This post quantifies the growth of API traffic on Cloudflare's network in 2021, showing it now represents 54% of total requests and is growing twice as fast as traditional web traffic. It details API growth by industry, highlighting significant increases in Banking, Retail, and Financial Services. The post also analyzes API characteristics, noting POST and GET as the dominant methods (98% of requests) and JSON as the primary payload encoding (97% of requests). It introduces Cloudflare's API Shield products (API Discovery, Schema Validation, mTLS, API Abuse Detection) as tools to protect against API-specific threats.