ColdFusion Rate Limiting APIs: Protecting Endpoints From Abuse Without Third-Party Middleware

ColdFusion has no built-in per-endpoint rate limiter in the core engine, but you don’t need third-party middleware to add one — you build it with tools ColdFusion already ships: the caching functions cacheGet/cachePut (or the application scope) to hold a per-client counter, and cfheader/restSetResponse to return HTTP 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After header when a client exceeds its limit. The standard, community-proven approach is a token-bucket algorithm keyed on the client's API key (or CGI.REMOTE_ADDR for anonymous traffic): each client gets a bucket of tokens that refills over time, every request spends one, and when the bucket is empty the request is rejected with a 429. Implement it in Application.cfc's onRequestStart (or a REST security CFC) so it protects every endpoint automatically. Two things determine whether it's production-grade: back the counter with Redis for multi-node deployments (per-node in-memory caches let a client on N nodes get N× their limit), and know that ColdFusion Enterprise's API Manager already provides SLA-based throttling if you'd rather configure than code. This guide builds a complete, no-middleware rate limiter with verified CFML.
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