How do streaming flows count for the API Rate Limits in Prefect Cloud?

hi @Gregory Hunt - these rate limits should still apply. It just depends on how many API calls you make, and what variety they are - it shouldn't matter whether its a batch or streaming workflow

What is considered an API call?

for example, when you load a block you have stored in prefect cloud, or you use

run_deployment

to hit

create_flow_run_from_deployment

or when your flow run / task run proposes a change in state that the orchestration engine in cloud must accept / reject .. all of these fall into the service-wide rate limit category. so this

If a steaming flow is running, is every time it gets a record to process considered an API call

depends on whether you're processing a record in a

task

or not, or creating an

Event

based on a record. If you're not doing either, then it doesn't contribute to your service wide Prefect Cloud API usage

So for example, I want one streaming flow that is listening to a pub/sub and when it gets a message that has a file name in it, I have a flow with a few tasks that parse and process that file and then write it into a database

ok turns out the docs were out of date, i just merged a PR to fix that, the service-wide rate limits are no longer enforced. so the only rate limits you should have to worry about against cloud are: • logs • flow and task run creation the numbers in the docs i linked above should still be accurate there isn't a direct empirical way I'm aware of to count all the API calls happening besides implementing some telemetry to count when certain endpoints are called from your code, but now that you're not constrained by service-wide rate limits, do you still need to?

I am just trying to understand if Prefect Cloud would work for my project or if it is better to role my own local server

If you exceed the task / flow run creation rate limit, we'll back-off and attempt to submit again some number of times (not sure off the top of my head how many) and eventually set the task/flow as Failed if it the rate limit is still exceeded