Apply multiple rate limits and window sizes

Uses: Kong Gateway decK

Deployment Platform:

Prerequisites

Kong Konnect

This is a Konnect tutorial. If you don’t have a Konnect account, you can get started quickly with our onboarding wizard.

The following Konnect items are required to complete this tutorial:
- Personal access token (PAT): Create a new personal access token by opening the Konnect PAT page and selecting Generate Token.
- Control Plane Name: You can use an existing Control Plane or create a new one to use for this tutorial.
- Konnect Proxy URL: By default, a self-hosted Data Plane uses http://localhost:8000. You can set up Data Plane nodes for your Control Plane from the Gateway Manager in Konnect.

Set the personal access token, the Control Plane name, the Control Plane URL, and the Konnect proxy URL as environment variables:

 export DECK_KONNECT_TOKEN='YOUR KONNECT TOKEN'
 export DECK_KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_NAME='YOUR CONTROL PLANE NAME'
 export KONNECT_CONTROL_PLANE_URL=https://us.api.konghq.com
 export KONNECT_PROXY_URL='KONNECT PROXY URL'

Kong Gateway running

This tutorial requires Kong Gateway Enterprise. If you don’t have Kong Gateway set up yet, you can use the quickstart script with an enterprise license to get an instance of Kong Gateway running almost instantly.

Export your license to an environment variable:

 export KONG_LICENSE_DATA='LICENSE-CONTENTS-GO-HERE'

Run the quickstart script:

 curl -Ls https://get.konghq.com/quickstart | bash -s -- -e KONG_LICENSE_DATA 

Once Kong Gateway is ready, you will see the following message:

 Kong Gateway Ready

decK

decK is a CLI tool for managing Kong Gateway declaratively with state files. To complete this tutorial you will first need to install decK.

Pre-configured entities

For this tutorial, you’ll need Kong Gateway entities, like Gateway Services and Routes, pre-configured. These entities are essential for Kong Gateway to function but installing them isn’t the focus of this guide. Follow these steps to pre-configure them:

Run the following command:

echo '
_format_version: "3.0"
services:
  - name: example-service
    url: http://httpbin.konghq.com/anything
routes:
  - name: example-route
    paths:
    - "/anything"
    service:
      name: example-service
' | deck gateway apply -

To learn more about entities, you can read our entities documentation.

Enable rate limiting

Enable the Rate Limiting Advanced plugin for the Gateway Service.

echo '
_format_version: "3.0"
plugins:
  - name: rate-limiting-advanced
    service: example-service
    config:
      namespace: example-namespace
      limit:
      - 10
      - 100
      window_size:
      - 60
      - 3600
' | deck gateway apply -

Each nth limit will apply to each nth window size.

This example applies rate limiting policies, one of which will trip when 10 hits have been counted in 60 seconds, or the other when 100 hits have been counted in 3600 seconds.

The number of configured window sizes and limits parameters must be equal (as shown above); otherwise, an error occurs.

Validate

After configuring the Rate Limiting Advanced plugin, you can verify that it was configured correctly and is working, by sending more requests then allowed in the configured time limit.

for _ in {1..11}; do
  curl  -i $KONNECT_PROXY_URL/anything  
  echo
done

for _ in {1..11}; do
  curl  -i http://localhost:8000/anything  
  echo
done

On the last request, you should get a 429 response with the message API rate limit exceeded.

Cleanup

Clean up Konnect environment

If you created a new control plane and want to conserve your free trial credits or avoid unnecessary charges, delete the new control plane used in this tutorial.

Destroy the Kong Gateway container

curl -Ls https://get.konghq.com/quickstart | bash -s -- -d

FAQs

Why can’t I use the regular Rate Limiting plugin to set multiple limits and window sizes?

You could use the regular Rate Limiting plugin to just set multiple limits, but the regular plugin doesn’t support configurable window sizes.