The out-of-the-box policy to guard services against high traffic loads is called?

• A. Rate limiting
• B. Circuit Breaker
• C. Throttling
• D. Caching

Answer: (A)

Controlling the rate of incoming requests is a fundamental way to shield services from traffic spikes. This built-in mechanism is rate limiting, which enforces a maximum number of requests per time unit, either globally or per client. When the limit is reached, extra requests are blocked or delayed, often returning a 429 Too Many Requests. It’s typically available out of the box in API gateways and cloud platforms, making it the standard policy for guarding against high loads. While throttling can describe slowing down traffic and circuit breakers protect against downstream failures, rate limiting is the specific approach designed to cap incoming traffic to keep services responsive. Caching reduces load by serving repeated requests from a store rather than the origin, but doesn’t bound traffic directly.