Librato hits the sweet spot for late adopters. Developers that are not willing to host their systems in the cloud, but need to implement reliable, automatic scaling should find Librato to be a realistic way forward. It allows for existing applications to be wrapped in “containers” and “templates” which transform them into monitored processes that produce performance metrics. Now with the Librato APIs, developers can now fully manage their process configuration set programatically. This company makes a serious offering to the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space with technology driven on an excellent strategy and backed by 12 million in funding.
At first glance you may think CloudMine is trying to put me out of buisness. As a contract developer, I find myself frequently working with APIs, and occasionally building them. The APIs I’ve built don’t make their way into ProgrammableWeb’s directory, for the most part they’re private APIs used by mobile devices to store user data and access dynamic content. Now the CloudMine API wants to provide that as a service for any mobile application.
In this post I’ll describe how we planned, built and tested a truly real-time location-based game with Socket.io, Redis, Node.js, and what we learned along the way. Over the past few months, we’ve spent the majority our free time building a real-time game as a test for our location platform, Geoloqi. We call the game MapAttack! due to its map-based nature. Two teams compete to capture the most points on the gameboard. The gameboard, in this case, is the city streets of the neighborhood the players are in.
When video rental and streaming company Netflix released its Netflix API, it was meant to support its DVD-by-mail business. In the time since the Netflix API was released, the business has shifted to streaming instant video, from hundreds of devices. Meanwhile, the Netflix API hasn’t changed much and it’s time for a redesign, according to Netflix’s Daniel Jacobson in his talk at OSCon Wednesday. Jacobson’s talk offers examples of how the next iteration might look, including doing away with versions, but creating unique endpoints for each partner’s application.
The Netflix API launched in 2008 with the same hope as many API providers: to attract developers who would build amazing applications on top of the service. Fast-forward 3 years: with more than 23 million subscribers in the United States and Canada, Netflix is the world’s leading Internet subscription service and the way in which millions of people are watching movies and TV shows — not just via DVDs shipped to their home, but increasingly online.
Asking the simple question to API maintainers of how scalable is your API seems to conjure some awkward pauses. The Easy API recently discovered how well equipped we were to handle a massive influx of requests to our system. Quickly it became evident that the system wasn’t able to handle over a million requests a month, and failed under heavy load. This article discusses programming, servers, and monitoring changes that helped bring The Easy API back online and into the next level. The techniques discussed played a critical role in helping The Easy API scale to over a million requests a month and growing rapidly.
ReportGrid has found an excellent niche and positioned itself as the leader of the pack when it comes to web-savvy. It provides data analytics as a service, which is not new in itself. The idea of providing this service with data submission through its ReportGrid API and analytics delivered in a web browser really takes it to the next level. ReportGrid is one of 43 analytics APIs, and one of 241 Enterprise APIs. Its simplicity makes it relevant to a broader audience than many of the more use-case tailored web services, such as those that focus on web site analytics or social media.
Google App Engine, the PaaS platform from Google has seen a steady number of releases since the beginning of this year. At Google I/O, a new version of the Google App Engine API was announced and brought with it a great set of features including support for a new programming language Go and revised pricing options that try to make Google App Engine an option for the enterprise.
If you’re writing a serious application, on the web or otherwise, you’ve got to have good logging. In the context of application development, reading logs is my personal favorite method for tracking bugs and rooting them out. A service like Loggly is perfect for programmers like me. It provides an easy to use web interface with searching capabilities that allows you to see what your application is logging at any time that you’d like to check in. Debugging with Loggly is nice, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg, thanks in part to its Loggly API.
Although it’s hard to do justice to the topic of API security in the space of a blog post, the topic is important because it affects every API architect creating a new web service. Advice that has come from experience may be of particular value—and that’s what follows here.
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