New Announcement From Integromat

Let me count the number of times I’ve made mention concerning polling architectures for integration services in this forum; hmmm… 29. Just over once per month.

Despite Integromat’s message indicating nefarious probing activity, I believe they may be pulling back because their servers are overwhelmed with recipes that are simply too egregious to perform without getting a little money to sustain the business. The large number of poorly-designed platforms that try to rescue unsuspecting users with minute-by–minute updates is likely taking its toll. And whatever the truth may be, constant polling for data changes will eventually end in a bad way with higher costs, restricted processing, or increasingly latent update intervals.

Blaming an escalation in fees on an increase in bot attacks and related to Twitter is not wise in my view because there are many ways to defend web services from unwelcomed requests. From the moment they go live, web services are attacked at rates unimaginable - millions of nefarious requests per minute and the attack rate only increases from there. This is like saying – we can’t defend our services from this onslaught, so you have to pay more.

While it’s not unexpected to see Twitter also putting pressure on integrators to end the serving of poorly-designed integrations, they’re looking for money as well.

Indeed, bots in the hands of nefarious actors is bad, but polling is on us (i.e., Airtable and its users).

If you depend on codeless integrations, it may be time to begin to move to a webhooks approach.