APItriggered

APItriggered describes systems and workflows that are initiated primarily by API calls rather than by direct user actions or scheduled timers. In this model, external applications invoke endpoints to start tasks, run jobs, or begin orchestrations, often returning a run identifier and status information.

Implementation typically involves exposing REST, GraphQL, or RPC interfaces. Calls may be synchronous, returning results directly, or asynchronous, enqueueing work for background processing. Common patterns include idempotency keys to prevent duplicate work, status endpoints to poll progress, and callbacks or webhooks to notify completion. Security considerations emphasize strong authentication, least-privilege access, and secure handling of credentials. Reliability features include retries with backoff, timeouts, and proper error handling. Observability is supported through structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics to monitor latency and throughput.

Use cases span many domains. API-triggered workflows are widely used to start CI/CD builds, initiate data processing pipelines, provision cloud resources, create support tickets automatically, and drive transactional workflows such as order fulfillment or customer onboarding.

Design considerations also encompass governance and performance. Scenarios with high request volume require scalable API gateways and asynchronous workers, while data-sensitive operations demand strict validation and encryption. Idempotent designs help ensure safe retries, and comprehensive monitoring enables rapid identification of failures.

Relation to other concepts: API-triggered actions differ from event-driven webhooks that are initiated by a producer service, though they can complement each other within an event-driven architecture. They may operate in tandem with message queues to decouple API surfaces from processing layers. See also: webhooks, REST, GraphQL, idempotency, event-driven architecture.