Years ago, I set myself to the task of counting the number of APIs I was hitting throughout the day. I gave up before lunch.
Here’s what I learned though, reliability is the key factor for any API service that powers today’s web and mobile applications. At least from the customer’s perspective. Even before my cup of coffee I’m pinging Spotify.
It’s 2024. We expect fast, consistent, and secure access to data and functionality, regardless of the network conditions or the load on the backend systems. To achieve this level of reliability, API providers need to implement a comprehensive strategy that covers design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of their APIs.
One of the tools that can help with this strategy is Azure API Management (APIM), a cloud-based service that enables you to create, publish, secure, and manage your APIs in a scalable and reliable way. APIM provides a range of features that help you ensure the availability, performance, and resilience of your APIs:
- Routing: You can define rules to route requests to different backend services based on various criteria, such as URL path, query parameters, headers, or content.
- Caching: You can store responses from your backend services in a distributed cache and serve them to subsequent requests without hitting the backend, reducing latency and load.
- Throttling: You can limit the number of requests that can be sent to your backend services within a specified time interval, preventing them from being overwhelmed by spikes in traffic.
- Retry: You can configure policies to automatically retry failed requests to your backend services, increasing the chances of successful delivery.
- Failover: You can specify backup endpoints for your backend services and switch to them in case of failures or downtime, ensuring continuity of service.
However, these features are not enough to handle all the possible scenarios that can affect the reliability of your APIs. For example, what if your backend service is experiencing intermittent errors or slow responses due to network issues or resource constraints? What if your backup endpoint is also unavailable or overloaded? What if you want to distribute the load across multiple instances of your backend service for better performance and scalability?
To address these challenges, APIM has introduced two new features that enhance its existing reliability capabilities: Load-Balanced Pool and Circuit Breaker.
Load-Balanced Pool is a feature that allows you to group multiple endpoints for the same backend service and balance the load among them using a round-robin algorithm. This way, you can improve the performance and availability of your backend service by distributing the requests across multiple instances. You can also specify health probes to monitor the status of each endpoint and remove unhealthy ones from the pool automatically.
Circuit Breaker is a feature that allows you to define policies to detect and handle failures in your backend service. You can set thresholds for error rates or response times and trigger actions when they are exceeded. For example, you can open a circuit breaker to stop sending requests to a failing backend service and redirect them to an alternative endpoint or return a custom error message. You can also configure how long the circuit breaker should remain open and under what conditions it should be closed.
These two features work together to provide a more robust and flexible way of managing the reliability of your APIs. For example, you can use Load-Balanced Pool to distribute the load across multiple endpoints for your backend service and use Circuit Breaker to handle failures in any of them. You can also use Circuit Breaker to switch between different Load-Balanced Pools based on their health status or performance metrics.
All that’s to say, if you’re worried about your clients or company missing out because of poor API performance and reliability—whether they’re trying to stream Taylor Swift or get the box score to the AFC championship— reach out to a trusted Cloud Service Provider. If you don’t have one, we would be happy to set up a time to talk this through with you and your team.
