Three Reasons Why APIs Fail
summary
Three concrete failure modes: inability to scale (mass OTP failures on the vaccination portal and mass login outages on crypto exchanges reveal a single login/auth bottleneck can stop everything), uncontrolled growth of services leading to microservice sprawl and inconsistent API rules, and missing operational ownership so nobody gets the alert when a vendor SMS or payment gateway goes down. Solutions include per-service scaling (scale the login independently), unified monitoring (New Relic style), and mapped teams with clear ownership and alerts for dependencies like the vaccine OTP SMS gateway.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:42Context
- 2:15Matt Schabel
- 4:15History of APIs
- 6:22What is an API
- 8:20Three Reasons Why APIs Fail
- 11:55Too Much Complexity Too Quickly
- 14:40Accountability
related talks
36mOne to millions - opportunities and challenges in scaling APIs.
26mTaming the beast - How to manage multiple API platforms at once
25mAPIs are not a technical challenge
26mWhy Your API Governance Fails at the Operating Model
27mAPI Economy and Ecosystem
25mDigital Transformation- Potential Pitfalls, Protection and PET's.
24mWhy Your API Adoption is Failing & How to Fix It
25mAPIOps: automating API operations for speed and quality at scale