The Role of Idempotency in API Design

Introduction

Idempotence is a concept where clients get the same response against multiple identical requests. Using idempotence, calling endpoints any number of times results in the call occurring only once. This is an important concept because it ensures that if a client repeatedly sends the same request, then the server state remains the same after the first call.

Before we discuss a practical example of idempotence, let's understand idempotence with the help of the following mathematical function: