[barrkel]

The alternative really is as Dan says: you end up with a bunch of REST endpoints that either serve up too much, or have configuration flags to control how much they serve, simply to satisfy front end concerns while avoiding adding round trip latency. You see this in much smaller apps than Google scale. It's a genuine tension.

Usually the endpoints get too fat, then there's a performance push to speed them up, then you start thinking about fat and thin versions. I've seen it happen repeatedly.