API architecture refers to a software building block that implements an API, such as the TCP/IP protocol. It is a fundamental component in data engineering, acting as a bridge between different software systems. APIs serve as a set of rules and are ideal for web services.
Building a robust API architecture involves defining API requirements and use cases, choosing the appropriate API style, and identifying and organizing the architecture. This guide covers the basics of designing an API architecture, including best practices and key principles.
A robust API indicates strong, flexible software, saving time on building and customizing solutions. It allows for seamless integration, scalability, and secure handling of data and interactions. A well-designed API architecture is easy to use and maintain, scalable, and can be extended as new technologies are developed.
The core idea behind the API-first approach is to design APIs that are clear, consistent, and well-documented from the outset. This allows for more efficient API implementation.
An API architecture consists of rules that determine functionalities to provide to API consumers. The API-first approach focuses on creating a clear, consistent, and well-documented API from the outset, allowing for more efficient API usage.
In conclusion, building a robust API architecture is essential for data engineers and developers to ensure seamless integration, scalability, and performance. By considering essential design patterns and best practices, developers can create reliable, scalable, and reusable code that stands the test of time.
📹 Top 6 Most Popular API Architecture Styles
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What Is The Robustness Principle Of API?
Every API implementation and consumer must adhere to Postel's Law, which states: "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept." This design guideline, known as the robustness principle, emphasizes the importance of minimizing data sent while being tolerant in accepting data from other services. The law is named after Jon Postel, who introduced it in an early specification of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which is fundamental to the functioning of the modern internet.
Postel's Law is crucial for the evolution of APIs, as it recognizes that it is impossible to predict how requirements may change or the variety of consumers that may interact with a service. It encourages developers to be cautious and conservative in their own transmissions, while remaining flexible and accommodating when receiving inputs from external sources. This approach fosters compatibility and robustness within networked applications.
In essence, the robustness principle serves as a vital guideline for software engineering, significantly impacting server application development and API design. Its relevance has only increased with time, underscoring a need for developers to embrace adaptability while maintaining a cautious approach to what they provide.
Overall, Postel's Law promotes resilience and flexibility in technical communication, ensuring that systems can handle diverse inputs and respond gracefully to unexpected data variations. By following this principle, software developers create more robust, interoperable systems that can thrive in the complex landscape of interconnected services. Thus, understanding and applying Postel's Law is fundamental to the successful design and implementation of APIs and related technologies.
What Is Robust System Architecture?
Robust software architecture plays a crucial role in enabling systems to adapt to dynamic requirements, effectively scale, and maintain reliability. Traditionally, robustness is seen as a system's capacity to function according to its specifications. Designing such architecture requires careful planning and adherence to best practices, incorporating principles like modularity and high scalability. By employing practical strategies, enterprise systems can become scalable, secure, and maintainable.
Robust systems are equipped with fail-safe mechanisms and error-handling processes to withstand disruptions and variations in load. Effective architecture adheres to four key pillars: structure, resilience, simplicity, and suitability, ensuring applications meet both current and future needs.
What Is RapidAPI Enterprise Hub?
RapidAPI Enterprise Hub is a white-labeled API marketplace designed to streamline the connection, discovery, and management of hundreds of APIs across various teams and API gateways. It facilitates coordination among API developers, consumers, and operations teams. Users can easily consume APIs through a unified format, making integration straightforward within applications. The platform features a comprehensive dashboard for monitoring API requests, latency, and error rates, enhancing visibility and control.
Serving developers, analysts, and product managers, the Enterprise Hub supports both internal and external APIs, integrating seamlessly with internal systems. It offers a customizable enterprise API management platform, fostering collaboration among development teams and trusted partners. The Enterprise Hub also accommodates disconnected API gateways and supports publishing APIs across different environments. Built on the world's largest public API hub, it includes governance, customization, and security features, making it essential for modern enterprise API infrastructures.
Why Is A Consistent API Architecture Important?
A consistent API architecture is essential for modern software development, facilitating seamless communication among applications, services, and devices. It defines how to structure, organize, and expose a software system’s data and functionalities. As businesses increasingly adopt distributed systems, consistent API design becomes crucial across public, partner, or private APIs. This uniformity aids developers in easily understanding and utilizing the API, ultimately enhancing maintainability and reducing errors.
API architecture allows external applications to access backend information effectively. With the rise of "as-a-service" delivery models, APIs become vital in building modular and scalable systems, playing a pivotal role in innovation and business growth. Clear and consistent naming conventions improve readability and user-friendliness for developers, guiding them through the API’s functionalities.
Effective API governance is necessary to maximize value, enabling the creation of the "right" APIs in the "right" manner. A well-structured architecture should balance ease of use, efficiency, scalability, security, and flexibility. Organizing resources logically further enhances usability.
Consistent APIs instill trust among developers, assuring them of predictable behavior across different contexts, thereby simplifying integration. This guide emphasizes the importance of adhering to standardized design patterns and explores popular API architecture styles that promote robust and scalable applications, ultimately aiding organizations in leveraging APIs efficiently.
What Is An Effective API Architecture?
An effective API architecture is built upon several key components that collectively enable a robust and scalable solution. At its foundation, the API acts as an interface facilitating data exchange and operations between systems. Essential components include endpoints, which are the URLs used by clients to access various resources or services. API architecture represents the technical framework necessary for developing software interfaces that expose backend data and application functionalities to external applications.
It encompasses various design considerations, focusing on creating reusable and interoperable components with a strong emphasis on the external interface. Understanding the purpose behind API implementation, expected outcomes, and execution strategies is crucial in API design.
This guide elaborates on six popular API architecture styles: REST, SOAP, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSocket, and Webhooks. Designing an API architecture requires adherence to common practices and standards, such as utilizing JSON for data exchange, ensuring version control, and following established conventions for request paths. Benefits of a well-designed API include enhanced developer experience, swift documentation, and greater adoption rates.
Ultimately, effective API architecture serves as a blueprint governing the structure, organization, and interaction of APIs, crucial for developing successful applications that prioritize scalability, security, and extendability.
How To Make An API Robust?
Step 4 focuses on best practices for designing robust APIs, emphasizing the importance of consistent naming conventions, appropriate use of HTTP status codes, input and output validation, effective error handling, and informative error messages. Utilizing techniques like pagination, filtering, sorting, and implementing rate limiting are crucial for maintaining API performance. Additionally, API versioning and comprehensive documentation enhance usability.
Building an API is vital for creating scalable, efficient systems whether for web applications, mobile services, or complex data management. To master API development, following RESTful principles contributes to an intuitive design, while using industry-standard authentication methods ensures security. An API, or Application Programming Interface, enables applications to utilize services from other platforms, providing enhanced functionality.
Error handling and exception management are critical, given that APIs are prone to issues. Implementing a robust error-handling system offers valuable feedback to users and maintains reliability. Developers must understand specific requirements, desired functionalities, and data types when crafting APIs.
This guide covers techniques for optimal performance, such as caching, compression, and asynchronous processing, alongside establishing clear monitoring objectives and alert systems. Additionally, recommended endpoint naming conventions, appropriate HTTP methods, and effective caching strategies are highlighted to enhance API reliability. Overall, the guide provides essential design principles to create maintainable and user-friendly APIs.
Which Are Features Of A Robust API Management Strategy?
API management encompasses activities like designing, publishing, documenting, testing, securing, monitoring, and monetizing APIs. It is crucial for improving security, performance, scalability, and the developer experience, thus enhancing an organization's API strategy. Public APIs foster innovation by enabling developers and businesses to create applications that utilize shared data and functionalities. A comprehensive API strategy hinges on three components: goals, rationale, and a concrete plan for implementation.
Each element is essential for effectiveness. Long-term success in business requires a robust API strategy, with a focus on clear objectives and security measures. API managers typically provide features including API design, documentation, and security policies like authentication and authorization. Key aspects of API management involve planning, design, documentation, and effective governance to ensure consistency and compliance.
An ideal API management platform includes governance features that offer visibility over APIs, enforce policies, track usage, manage access, and implement security measures such as end-to-end encryption and role-based access control (RBAC).
How To Build A Robust API?
When building robust APIs, choosing the right tools and frameworks is crucial. Popular options include Express. js for Node. js, Django Rest Framework for Python, and Ruby on Rails for Ruby. This guide will cover API development using Node. js, Django, and Spring Boot, focusing on how to design, build, secure, and deploy APIs effectively. An Application Programming Interface (API) allows applications to utilize services from other platforms, enhancing functionality.
Key steps include defining API requirements, selecting an appropriate style, organizing resources, and creating clear documentation. Security is paramount, so implement authentication measures like API keys or OAuth. This resource outlines essential API design patterns, emphasizing consistency as a guiding principle, and offers best practices for developing APIs that are user-friendly, maintainable, and scalable.
How To Make An API Resilient?
To enhance API reliability, implement several key strategies. Start with robust error handling; informative error messages help clients address issues effectively. Utilize versioning to facilitate upgrades without disrupting existing integrations. Rate limiting controls request frequency, preventing overload on the system.
Resilience begins with thoughtful design—keep it simple and consistent for developer ease. A comprehensive guide to resilient APIs elaborates on design principles, best practices, and real-world examples, underscoring their importance in ensuring reliability and scalability, particularly in frameworks like . NET 8 Web API using Microsoft. Extensions. Http. Resilience.
Best practices include employing testing and monitoring tools, establishing clear communication with API users, and ensuring effective error handling. Common design patterns enhance resilience, like using headers for event information, configuring timeouts for external calls, and incorporating circuit breakers to avoid cascading failures.
Implementing a retry policy addresses temporary service failures effectively. Employ HTTP status codes, provide clear error messages, and validate inputs and outputs to build resilience within your systems, enabling recovery from disruptions like network outages or traffic spikes. Overall, prioritize these strategies to fortify your API against vulnerabilities.
📹 Want to build a good API? Here’s 5 Tips for API Design.
Want to build better APIs that can evolve over time as your system requires changes? Here are 5 tips that will help you change …
00:00 – 00:30 intro 00:30 – 02:25 Where to generate resource IDs (auto-incrementing IDs vs UUIDs) 02:25 – 04:05 Generate meaningful identifiers. (Understandable not just readable) 04:05 – 07:37 Provide meaningful response (that’s actually pretty nice) 07:37 – 08:52 Prefer returning a JSON object response instead of an array. This way you leave room for extension. 08:52 – 08:52 Refrain from using technical jargons and prefer language of the domain — 01:32 Even if you’re using auto-incrementing IDs, you could save the order with status “pending” and then return that ID. You could still process the order async.
For tip 1, if you are moving the ID up to the API and queuing the persistence, then how errors are handled becomes important and adds complexity. You might be trading the speed of create request time for having clients poll for errors or confirmations the order is created successfully. Does not invalidate the idea, particularly for systems that handle large volumes of requests, but it is a bit of advanced topic/implementation thats needs the developer to apply some thought.
an important thing to consider if you add actions, as shown here, is caching – if, for example, the “cancel order” action is only valid for the next 15 minutes, cache expiration should be set accordingly. this can get a little tricky if you have multiple actions with different expiration. part of me honestly likes to avoid this type of problem – in some cases, you might prefer to design endpoints with less data, requiring the client to make multiple, individually-cacheable requests, each endpoint having only one reason to expire and need a refresh. just something to consider. 🙂
This is such great advice – everyone needs to watch this, you’ve covered everything wrong with the AWS public APIs at least. One recommendation/alteration I would like to add, especially if this API is specifically for integration, is to use capabilities as your identifier scheme. That is, the opaque part should have more than 16 bytes of entropy and be cryptographically generated. This reduces the need for complex permissions checking in the server and allows integrations to subset access to your objects without having to proxy all requests. Object-capability security has been a long time coming on the web, but articles like this one give me hope.
Really interesting ideas! If there was one thing about API design I’d really love people to stick to, it would also be just sticking to well known REST principles. May it be the design of the URL, or the response. I’ve seen so many crude apis which e.g. list getting an account as “api/account/getAccount” instead of just “api/account”, and modifying entries of a catalogue as something like “api/catalogue/updateCatalogueWithItem” instead of something like PUT / POSTing to “api/catalogue//items”. Responses are the same. We have well defined status codes and http statuscodes, but a lot of apis would rather return a 200 with a body containing custom enums… It’s a mess out there. I wish this stuff was more standardized across the board.
This is great advice full stop! and another reason that’s this guidance important is Security!.. Never send sequential ids to the client. we all know that one logged in user should never be able to see another logged users data with all good intentions however recent security breaches demonstrates discoverability of id leads to information leaks to the tune of millions of users. Security is a topic that deserves it’s own dedicated attention and let’s explore this more.
We have a rule that if it’s a database concern it shouldn’t be exposed in the Api. This helped a lot for people to understand why int ids and even guids were not a good idea and helped in creating real business keys for data that migrate across boundaries actually made sense. I think more content creators should help enlighten the benefits of Hypermedia as the engine of application state (HATEOAS) in proper REST api design. Thanks for sharing.
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:41 🆔 Consider where you generate identifiers (IDs) in a distributed environment to avoid collisions and enable asynchronous processing. 02:32 🌐 Generate meaningful identifiers that are human understandable, providing valuable information at a glance. 04:10 📄 Include information in API responses about possible actions based on the current state of the system to guide clients on what they can do. 06:43 🔄 Embrace evolvability by focusing on actions in responses, reducing client logic changes when business rules evolve. 08:49 🚫 Avoid handcuffing yourself by designing responses with flexibility, allowing for additions without breaking backward compatibility. 09:04 📋 Use the language of your domain in API design, capturing behaviors and capabilities with terms that make sense within the context. Made with HARPA AI
Interesting 3rd point. In the example discussed, the “CancelOrder” action will not be invoked by the caller immediately after the Order object is returned because in the real world customers don’t cancel right after they’ve placed the order. The order will be cancelled sometime in the future and by that time the “state is pending and the order was placed in the last 15 minutes” condition may no longer be true. So does the server returning the cancel action really matter aside from making the route opaque to the client?
@3:00 The topic of “understandable IDs” resonated with me. I’ve always been keen on designing IDs that provide insight into the data’s origin or domain just by their format. However, I’ve consistently been advised against it. Many blog articles emphasize that IDs shouldn’t carry business logic and doing so might even be considered poor practice, since their primary function is to index unique rows in a database.
I pretty much disagree with all of this. A record’s ID should ALWAYS be of a consistent affinity across tables. Asynchronously, an autoincrement ID can collide, which is why you should use UUID, GUID or CUID. If you need something human-readable, it should go in a different column, such as “code”, (not “order_code”, since it exists within the context of an order hence redundant). There is also some advice regarding adding “states” or “actions” being added to a response object. A pure REST API should only return the state of the resource without additional fields. The consuming application should be aware of the possible states, and which actions can be performed under which state, so you can add PUT /orders/:id { “state”: “cancelled” } and the API would return the updated resource, or a 415 error if that state can no longer be legally applied to the resource. REST should be a minimal representation of the state of a resource – there must to be some awareness of certain rules/constraints on the client’s end whether it’s via documentation or something like OpenAPI.
Something I would recommend seeing this example is to not call things order->orderID and customer->customerID – it’s redundant. It should always (in my opinion) be customer->id and order->id. If you want to have identifying parameters on an object, the advice with a meaningful ID (such as CA-ON-xxx) is good. Stripe also does this (cus_xxyy, pi_xxyy etc.). As an alternative, have a type property with a string that identifies the object’s type.
A tip for IDs: Use a timestamp, concat it with the user id and the return it encoded in base64. Guaranteed unique, cheap to produce, good with utf-8, can be safely done in multiple locations and doesn’t give away internal info about volumes. Downside is that it’s obviously a bit longer, maybe 40 chars, and isn’t human friendly. But who cares?
I wish you expanded more on why you believe IDs should be generated high in the stack for the API to be extendable in the future. I understand the advantages you mentioned but they don’t seem related to our ability to expand the API in the future in a backward compatible way. In any case, great article! Well done
In the example of order canceling, from a UI standpoint, you might want to display a greyed-out cancel button and a reason why an order can’t be canceled. If the state was ‘shipped’ for example, how would you add this? An idea I came up with is the following: “`json { “orders”: ( { “orderID”: “CA-ON-54812”, “status”: “shipped”, “actions”: ( { “name”: “CancelOrder”, “enabled”: false, “reasons”: (“status:shipped”) } ) } ) } “` The front end could then use this reason to find a translation key for the reason it is unavailable, I made it an array in case there might be multiple reasons. Do you think this is a good idea and why/why not? How did you solve this in the past?
This is a great article. Thanks for the insight! What is an in-depth resource for point three? I have some questions about it as far as implementing best practices, such as: – What is the expectation for clients persisting these actions? I’ve seen a comment about setting cache expiration, but what about for actions without one? Do clients typically store these actions and query it on their side when coming back in a future session? – Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like one of the benefits of point three is to essentially self document endpoints. However, how detailed should documentation be external to the response? For example, obviously, a POST endpoint seems like it should be documented as it’s basically the first entry point into a service. However, tying into my first question, is it reasonable to expect a client to not need a GET endpoint documented if they’re storing the actions on their side? That feels a bit too imposing upon them to me. However, documenting a GET endpoint for an entity eliminates the benefit of obscuring that URI. I’m sure I’ll have other questions as I look into this, so a great resource would be much appreciated. Bonus points if it explains it more casually. Technical documentation is tough for me to read, though paired with a more casual resource would be the best. Thanks in advance!
I usually agree with all you say but I would never recommend having meaningful concatenated keys as id, it invites to code that uses substring and split to do actual logic on. A big no no. it also leads to y2k like problems where at some point in time an extra character is needed to contain the future info. also when an order is being redirected to for instance an other area where they have it in stock, you will see stupid “citizen developer” systems like BI reports or power apps that use the substring of the id to calculate/group the profit of an area. if you need meaningfull info on your order just add the property itself in the message “Area” : “Ontario”, that is a property that can be updated when needed, you can never update the id.
If, you can only cancel an order if it is in the pending status and was created less than 15 minutes ago. You put the action in to the json at the server end. Now the client gets that json and goes to the bathroom for 20 minutes. Now the action is invalid, but since the client hasn’t refreshed their call, they can just go ahead and cancel the order, even though it may be too late or the status has changed.
I don’t think there is problem with auto-increment Id building even-driven systems. Like in a transactional and building financial solution environment, you always have unique identifiers like reference which you already have strategy on how you generate it. IDs for me are just for record arrangement in the dbs I am less concerned about that, has nothing to do with the strategy you wanna use to store your data
Thanks as always for the great content Derek! Regarding meaningful identifiers, this is an interesting tip. My only concern is to be sure anyone in the organization treats it as identifiers and no more, in that case works like a charm. If, for some reason, in some services, someone adds the logic that splits the ID to pickup “CA” and “ON”, evolving the ID and making it have a different structure will cause an unpredictable problem in those services. Have you ever experienced something like this?