Internet

Is It True That Most Internet Traffic Consists of API Calls?

When I was scrolling on Instagram, suddenly I got sponsored content from AWS, represented by Donnie Prakoso, one of the Senior Developer Advocate at AWS. He said, "Fun fact, most of the traffic on the internet is API calls".

For me, this was interesting, I immediately opened ChatGPT and immediately looked for an explanation. Want to know the explanation? Let's read below.

Yes, it's generally true that a significant portion of internet traffic today is composed of API calls. With the rise of cloud computing, mobile applications, microservices architectures, and web-based services, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) play a crucial role in enabling different systems to communicate.

Key factors driving the high volume of API traffic include:

Mobile Applications: Mobile apps frequently communicate with back-end services through APIs to fetch data, perform actions, and synchronize content.
Microservices: Many modern systems are built using microservices architecture, where different components interact via APIs to perform operations.
Web Applications: Most modern web apps rely heavily on APIs to interact with servers for dynamic content, user authentication, data updates, and more.
IoT Devices: Many Internet of Things (IoT) devices use APIs to send and receive data to/from servers, further contributing to internet traffic.
Cloud Services: Cloud platforms and SaaS applications provide services and data to clients through APIs.

While it's difficult to give an exact percentage, APIs form a substantial portion of today's internet traffic.

Reading the explanation above, it really makes sense that in this era, internet traffic is filled with API calls. Moreover, today's architecture uses a lot of microservices, interactions between modules use a lot of APIs, for example, even if you want to send an e-mail using a REST based API, which previously usually used a direct SMTP connection.

In fact, if we just open a random website, then open DevTools, there will definitely be API calls that occur on the Network tab, whether it's the API from the site itself, the API from the analytics side or the API from the advertising side. That's only on the front-end side which is visible from the DevTools Network tab. Not to mention the back-end side which is sometimes connected to other parties via API, for example sending OTP, sending e-mail, sending query data from external API and so on.

Yeah, we live in the APIconomy era. Embrace it.