The engineering bottleneck with assembled stacks
Partnership managers hand out credentials over email because the API has one door and one master key with a nicer name. Rate limits live in middleware nobody can show the partner, usage disputes are settled by whoever screenshots first, and revoking a departed partner means rotating a key that three active partners also use — so nobody rotates anything, ever.
Architecture on the Software Lifecycle Cloud
Gateway routes declare their API keys; each partner’s key maps to a partner row that carries their scopes, limits, and counters. Functions check the partner slice on the way in — key, scope, remaining rate — and increment counters on the way out. The partner-facing usage view reads the same counters, so the invoice, the throttle, and the dashboard never disagree.
Revocation that is actually possible
The security property that matters is boredom: one partner’s key, rotated or revoked, touches one partner. Keys are declared per route in stack.json, minted once with the raw key printed a single time, and rotated by declaration. The audit trail of who had which key when is the git history of the stack plus the key records — not an email thread.
- Per-partner keys and scopes: a leak is one partner’s incident, not everyone’s rotation party
- Rate counters in the partner slice make throttling explainable with records, not middleware folklore
- Partner usage views read the same counters that enforce limits — no duelling dashboards
Contracts in data, not in code branches
Partner tiers, trial limits, and bespoke quotas are rows, so commercial changes stop being deployments. When a partner graduates from trial to contracted, the limits update in their slice and the change carries an author and a date. Engineering leaves the pricing conversation; the data stays where the pricing conversation can see it.
Frequently asked questions
Add their gateway API key and partner row with scopes and limits, hand over the key through your secure channel — it is printed once, at minting — and their calls start counting against their own counters immediately.
Yes. A read surface over their counter slice shows calls, rates, and remaining quota. Disputes end quickly because the numbers they see are the numbers the throttle used.
Revoke or rotate that partner’s declared keys. Other partners’ keys are independent by construction, so the response is a one-line declaration change instead of a coordinated rotation across everyone you work with.
Related capabilities, architectures, and comparisons
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