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Latency is only the first tradeoff in choosing where the merge runs: the location also determines behavior when one service is unavailable, how much of the response can be cached, and which team must approve a change before the screen ships.
Frames the merge-location decision as multi-dimensional: beyond speed, it shapes failure handling, caching, and ownership — the broader design space the article will explore. ✦ AI generated
Author (unnamed) · ByteByteGo Newsletter · 2026-08-13 · original ↗
However, latency is only the first tradeoff. The place where the merge operation runs also determines what happens when one of the four services is unavailable, how much of the response can be cached, and which team has to approve a change before the screen ships.
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The code that merges responses can run on the client, on a server, at a CDN edge, or inside a service; and while putting a server between the app and the services adds a network hop, it usually reduces total load time because trading four expensive phone-to-server round trips for one expensive trip plus four cheap server-to-server trips is a large net saving.Author (unnamed) · ByteByteGo Newsletter · conf 85%In a service-based architecture, a single product screen commonly requires data from several separate services, each storing only its own data, so the caller issues one call per service and merges the responses in the structure the user interface needs — and this merging step, API composition, exists in every system where data is split across more than one service.Author (unnamed) · ByteByteGo Newsletter · conf 80%