You need to keep many things in mind when dealing with consumers, particularly in regard to keeping track of them. You need to know who a consumer is, which can be done either by looking at a user agent or by performing authentication. You need to version your endpoint and keep track of which version consumers use so you can later deprecate a version. And when consumers of a public application programming interface (API) start hogging resources, you need to cut them off.
User Agents
Whenever a request enters your service, it should contain a user agent, a string used to represent the client ...
