A single buggy script or a malicious attacker can crash your entire cluster by making 10,000 requests per second. Rate Limiting ensures that each user/client is restricted to a fair amount of traffic. It is the "Bodyguard" of your microservices.
With .NET 7+, Rate Limiting is built into the framework. You can define global policies in Program.cs or per-endpoint policies using attributes.
app.UseRateLimiter(); // Native .NET Rate Limiting MiddlewareQ: "What is the difference between Rate Limiting and Throttling?"
Architect Answer: "The difference is how the system handles the overflow. **Rate Limiting** is hard: once you hit the limit, you get a '429 Too Many Requests' error immediately. **Throttling** is soft: the system starts to slow down the response time for that user (queueing the requests) to discourage them from sending more. Rate limiting is for protection; Throttling is for traffic management."