I am Kaleb, a web developer running Dream Futures Tech right out of Pompano Beach, Florida. Recently, I added a public chat widget to my own business website to let visitors drop quick questions. Because the endpoint lives on a Netlify serverless function, it is completely open to the public internet. Within a few days of deploying it, I noticed automated script traffic trying to hammer the endpoint. I needed a reliable rate limiter without paying for expensive third-party edge security tiers.

Netlify Functions are great for hosting lightweight APIs, but they are stateless and spin down when idle. Relying on an in-memory cache inside the function container does not work because the container instances scale up, down, and across regions.…