API Traffic Management 101

API Traffic Management 101

by Mike Amundsen
Released December 2019
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9781492056386

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Book description

Monitoring and managing API traffic can be a complicated undertaking. Most companies today need to deal with securing API traffic from outside their organizational boundaries as well as optimizing traffic between services running behind the company firewall. In this practical report, author Mike Amundsen introduces developers and network administrators to the basic concepts and challenges of monitoring and managing API traffic.

You’ll learn approaches for observing and controlling external traffic (known as the North/South model) and for optimizing internal traffic (the East/West model). You’ll also examine the business value of good API traffic practice that connects your business goals and internal progress measurements to useful traffic monitoring, reporting, and analysis.

  • Understand the challenges and advantages of initiating API traffic management
  • Examine the North/South and East/West models for handling API traffic
  • Monitor the health of your API system using traffic metrics and formulas
  • Explore security basics including API keys, authentication, authorization, and encryption
  • Maintain network reliability and resilience to provide a healthy and scalable infrastructure for your API platform
  • Learn options for diagnosing and automating your traffic management approach

Table of contents

  1. Preface
    1. Who Should Read This Book
    2. How to Get the Most from This Book
    3. Additional Reading
    4. Conventions Used in This Book
    5. O’Reilly Online Learning
    6. How to Contact Us
    7. Acknowledgments
  2. 1. The Power of API Traffic Management
    1. Monitoring with KPIs
      1. Management Challenges
      2. Traffic Challenges
      3. Monitoring Challenges
      4. From Managing to Understanding
    2. OKRs
      1. Gaining Insight
      2. Solving Problems
      3. Anticipating Needs
    3. Summary
    4. Additional Reading
  3. 2. Managing Traffic
    1. Controlling External Traffic
      1. Crossing Boundaries
      2. Typical Responsibilities
      3. Common Challenges
    2. Optimizing Internal Traffic
      1. Enabling Services
      2. Typical Responsibilities
      3. Common Challenges
    3. Summary
    4. Additional Reading
  4. 3. Monitoring Traffic
    1. Monitoring Levels
      1. Infrastructure Metrics
      2. Service Metrics
      3. Business Metrics
    2. Typical Traffic Metrics
      1. Rate Limits
      2. Request Latency and Duration
      3. Error Rates
      4. Other Considerations
    3. Common Traffic Formulas
      1. The USE Method
      2. The RED Method
      3. The LETS Method
    4. Summary
    5. Additional Reading
  5. 4. Securing Traffic
    1. Security Basics
      1. API Keys
      2. Identity/Authentication
      3. Access Control/Authorization
      4. Encryption Considerations
      5. Managing Authentication Risk
      6. Mediating External Security Systems
    2. Managing Access with Tokens
      1. The JWT Specification
      2. The JWT
      3. Grants by Value
      4. Grants by Reference
    3. Summary
    4. Additional Reading
  6. 5. Scaling Traffic
    1. Surviving Network Errors
      1. Safety I and Safety II
    2. Stability Patterns
      1. Health Check
      2. Health Reporting
      3. TimeOut and FailFast
      4. Bulkhead
      5. Circuit-Breaker
      6. Summary of Survival Patterns
    3. Caching
      1. Machine-Level Caching
      2. Network-Level Caching
    4. Summary
    5. Additional Reading
  7. 6. Diagnosing and Automating Traffic
    1. Business Metrics
      1. The OKR Cycle
    2. Automation
      1. Automating Testing
      2. Automating Deployment
      3. Automating Alerting and Recovery
    3. Runtime Experiments
      1. Site Reliability Engineering
      2. Chaos Engineering
    4. Summary
    5. Additional Reading
  8. A. From Monitoring to Managing and Beyond

Product information

  • Title: API Traffic Management 101
  • Author(s): Mike Amundsen
  • Release date: December 2019
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781492056386