Corentin Brossault

Relying on third-party APIs? Do you know what is an API Service-Level Agreements (SLA)? How to find them? What to look after?

Find out in our checklist about API SLA for CTOs, CIOs & CISOs

Machine learning (ML) used to be a tool limited to specialized developers and dedicated teams. Now, thanks to many web service providers and approachable tooling, applications can use pre-build learning models and machine learning techniques the same way you would use any web service API.

This is a quick way to test out and benefit from machine learning without having to invest in artificial intelligence, building your own learning models, or shaping your application around ML. To learn more about the ML offering within the big players, read on: https://blog.bearer.sh/machine-learning-api-web/

At Bearer, we are a polyglot engineering team. Our stack is made up of services written in Node.js, Ruby, Elixir, and a handful of others in addition to all the languages our agent library supports.

Like most teams, we balance using the right tool for the job with using the right tool for the time.

Recently, we reached a limitation in one of our services that led us to transition that service from Node.js to Rust. This post goes into some of the details that caused the need to change languages, as well as some of the decisions we made along the way.

It's old news that applications rely more and more on APIs.

I've recently talked about Akamai that estimated, in 2018, that 83% of Internet Traffic is now API-traffic.

More recently, we have explained that using an application performance monitoring (APM) tools let you provide metrics on the inner workings of your application. But sometimes, you need more details about the API calls (aka the logs of the request, its headers, its body, etc.).

One of Bearer key features is that it can log all external API requests by instrumenting the HTTP core module of most backend programming language, including: Go, Python, PHP and of course Node.js. There's no magic here and the team has recently explained on our blog how we did it in Node.js. The link is in the comment.

In 2018, Akamai estimated that 83% of Internet Traffic is now API-traffic. It was only 47% in 2014. Excluding binary content (such as video and images), HTML now counts for only 17%. The rest is all JSON & XML.

With such an amount of API requests, having a great API client is key. And an API client is not just a function that lets you fetch distant resource... Having a retry-logic built-in is the minimal, has the connection is unreliable and unpredictable.

On our blog, we will show you how to build your own retry-logic in Node.js and JavaScript. But if you want to go further than just retry mechanism, add Bearer to your stack.

Our dashboard lets your engineering team manage all your APIs requests and create rules to retry requests, block them, and more based on a variety of criteria that you set.

How to Recover from API Downtimes and Errors? APIs are stable until they aren’t...

We talk about that often at Bearer. If you control the APIs, it gets easier, but with third-party APIs and integrations, it can be more difficult to predict when an outage or incident is about to happen.

Read our best practices when it comes to handling these errors in your app: https://blog.bearer.sh/api-error-fallbacks-remediation/

Modern applications aren’t built in silos. They rely on the features of other applications. This reliance can come in the form of open-source libraries, access to a wealth of data, or complex features distilled down into a consumable API. Whatever the source, there is a strong relationship that happens when using a dependency. Your app benefits from it, but it also gives back (in the form of money, exposure, or data). In our latest blog post, we share our best practices when it comes to build API integrations: https://blog.bearer.sh/api-integration-best-practices/

We recently shared here our article on "What's an API gateway?". A very related topic when you talk about gateway is "service mesh". Tons of articles are talking about it, but do you really know what it is? How it works? And more importantly: is it made for you and your project?

Learn more about Service mesh in our latest article on the Bearer blog: https://www.bearer.sh/blog/what-is-a-service-mesh

Things go in. People, traffic, requests. If you've spent any time with microservices, you may have come across the term "API gateway". But do you really know what it is?

We've recently gathered the top 4 reasons to start monitoring third-party APIs.

Here's a recap:

🚫 It avoids bottlenecks

🤗 It makes sure you use them

🎎 It helps identify fallback

🙈 Because you can't control someone else's service

Read more here: https://www.bearer.sh/blog/why-monitor-api-usage