#Scaling when tied to an external API
The growing prevalence of APIs has been both a blessing and curse. On the one hand, we can build digital products that are rich with data from all corners of the Internet. We can connect platforms that wouldn't otherwise work together, create services that analyze different data sources, and populate our databases with authentic seed data; all from information we didn't collect ourselves. On the other hand, we find ourselves building products that are at the mercy of those APIs and their stability, performance, and changes deemed necessary by their own product and development teams.
Success, even viability, for some products is critically dependent on one or more APIs. Epion Health provides an app that acts as a 3rd party interface to a major EMR (Electronic Medical Record) system. As a web-based product, nearly every page load of the app requires communication through the EMR's API. In many cases, there's no way to circumvent an API request because patient infor