APIs exist in a strange duality. On the one hand, they must be stable. On the other, they must evolve. In our featured article, we see how to evolve APIs with a comprehensive introduction to API versioning.
Next up, functional attacks for APIs are on the rise. In this article, Omer Primor of Imvision provides an overview of the API attack landscape and shares results from an interesting study on API security.
A proper API versioning strategy ensures an API version remains functional when you enact changes on the code. It also means that API consumers using older versions of the API won’t experience any breaking change. By communicating change effectively, consumers have plenty of time to update their integrations accordingly. We’ve put together a guide to API versioning. We’ll introduce how API designers can create versions of their APIs and offer some examples of why API versioning is a good idea. We’ll also look into when API versioning isn’t a good idea! ...
With the speed of change accelerating around us, we need new and improved ways of collaborating. Thus, it’s understandable why API adoption is so strong in many industries. The use cases differ, but they all lead to increased information sharing, collaborative work, and a shift toward open ecosystems. As a recent survey conducted by Imvision shows, 4 out of 5 organizations already enable either partners (B2B) or users (B2C) to access their data with external APIs. But this growing exchange of information doesn’t come without its fair share of risks. Having more APIs published and consumed also means more functionality being exposed. The business logic that was once hidden within an application can now be accessed — and potentially manipulated — directly...
It will come as absolutely no surprise that, in 2020, the retail space looked very different from a typical year. And, it will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future. Sure enough, Amazon profits increased significantly. Their Q4 2020 new release states their operational cash flow has increased by 72% to $66.1 billion in the last 12 months. However, what may come as a surprise is the extent to which APIs were instrumental to the latest shifts in online commerce. eBay’s Buy APIs, for example, hit $5 billion in cumulative GMB (Gross Merchandise Bought) this year. We interviewed Tanya Vlahovic, who heads up developer relations at eBay, to gather her thoughts about the state of commerce and APIs. Below, we look at some of these trends and see what Vlahovic and other industry experts have to say....
Space travel has become a routine fact of life in the modern age, as strange as that may sound. While many reading this may have grown up when launches were few and far between, 2021 has several major companies funding exploration and development in space and aeronautics.
One of the coolest outcomes of this is the presence of so many awesome space APIs. Today, we’re going to look at 11 of the coolest currently usable APIs. While these are in no particular order in terms of quality, they do progress roughly from most simple to the most complex...
Spot instances are Amazon’s mechanism for selling spare capacity. Essentially, they are unused compute instances AWS is prepared to sell at a major discount. The catch is that if the price goes up above your bid, the instances are terminated with two minutes’ notice. This means that, to leverage spot instances, users must put automation in place to control these cloud machines programmatically. In this article, we’ll introduce spot instances and how to work with the spot instance API. This is an essential API for any organization that leverages the Amazon cloud, because it can uncover dramatic savings in cloud costs.
As our technology progresses, complexity also increases day by day. One such new complexity is managing asynchronous tasks with APIs. Suppose your application requires a lot of background calculations. Instead of making a user wait in front of an empty UI, asynchronous API endpoints can perform background jobs and inform the user when the task is complete. Asynchronous processes not only improve the user experience but allow you to manage a server load quite well. Imagine a different scenario involving a giant web app built on a standard REST API without multi-threading, without async, and without task queues. Now, what happens when the application suddenly has 50,000 users, all wanting the system to perform complex, lengthy processes? Without the right plumbing, the application could easily experience downtime.
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