endpointscommonly

Endpoints are interaction points where clients reach services in a computer system. They can be web API URIs, network service addresses, or messaging endpoints, and are central to how software components exchange data and trigger actions. The phrase endpoints commonly refers to the set of endpoints that appear most frequently in a given domain, such as RESTful APIs or microservice architectures.

In web APIs, endpoints are accessed via standard protocols (typically HTTP or HTTPS) and mapped to operations using verbs like GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. A well-designed API uses consistent, resource-oriented URLs, often using plural nouns. Versioning, error reporting, and security requirements are encoded into endpoints or the accompanying documentation.

Common endpoints include health checks (for example, /health or /status), metrics (e.g., /metrics), authentication (e.g., /auth/login or /oauth/token), and user management (e.g., /users, /users/{id}). Other typical routes might expose data collections, individual records, or sub-resources such as /users/{id}/orders.

Beyond REST, endpoints may be GraphQL, where a single /graphql endpoint handles varied queries, or gRPC, exposing a set of RPC methods on a service. In messaging and event-driven systems, endpoints correspond to queues or topics, such as a Kafka topic or an AMQP route.

Design and maintenance of commonly used endpoints emphasize clear naming, stable versioning, and thorough documentation, often using API descriptions like OpenAPI. Security considerations include transport-layer encryption, authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and input validation to protect endpoints from misuse.

Understanding commonly used endpoints helps developers design interoperable services and enables reliable integration, testing, and monitoring across systems.