Developers often can’t control API downtime, but they can certainly monitor for it. Yet, sending periodic pings to a service is only one of many ways to use API monitoring. To avoid common API headaches, you can apply monitoring principles across the entire API lifecycle, starting before you’ve written a single line of code. Design and Development: A…
Category: API Academy for All Roles
TechTalk: Implementing an Enterprise GraphQL Server
GraphQL is undeniably gaining traction in the Enterprise. TechTalk hosts Bill and Aran were joined by Broadcom Technology Partner Arvata for an introduction to GraphQL and an exciting unveiling of Arvata’s innovation that enables gateways to function as an Enterprise GraphQL server and GraphQL proxy. Arvata demonstrated how easy it is to use their GraphQL technology with Layer7…
API Design Best Practices for Enterprises
Your API program will see more success with a thoughtful API design phase. Effort spent on architecture often returns as time saved during other phases of your project. These efficiencies add up across the hundreds or thousands of APIs you support. Your API design should be backed by your company’s strategy and focused on real use cases. By…
Gateway Secure Deployment Architecture
In today’s digital world, API gateways are often the first interaction of incoming requests from the outside world. In most scenarios, enterprises place the gateways in DMZ strategically to secure, protect and throttle their internal digital assets. Hence, security for these gateways becomes crucial and they need to be properly configured and hardened. Whether it is a legacy…
Managing the Effect of Slow Back-end Systems
Introduction: API deployments need to maintain a stable network behaviour, with widely varying back end systems. In a previous article, I talked about the need to maintain user experience. In a Layer7 API Gateway based deployment, back end systems that have high latency have some very interesting side effects. To effectively manage a gateway in a production environment,…
Plan for a Better UX Under Load by Planning for Errors
Plan to scaleWhen planning for scale, every tool out there has individual capacity limits. Many can scale horizontally, and many scale vertically, but ALL of them cost time, money, or both to scale. Unbounded scaling is just not available for free. Even if the products in use attract no licenses fees, there are always costs: CPU, hosting, installation,…
How-To: Create a Private Key for Signing JWT ID Tokens
Feel free to jot this down: RFC7519. We all have our favourite IETF standards, don’t we? Something we read again and again in front of the roaring fireplace with our slippers on. Something to chuckle at in darker times, to ponder over, and oh yes, to shed a tear for, whilst contemplating the sheer brilliance of it all. …
TechTalk: Docker and High Performance Architecture
In our February 2020 TechTalk, hosts Bill and Aran were joined by Michael Skolik, managing Consultant and Architect, Enterprise Studio by HCL Technologies. He described the steps necessary to achieve a high-performance architecture when using Docker, with an excellent Q&A at the end. Definitely worth watching!
How to Beat Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is a type of security threat in which malicious actors can steal user data and authentication information by gaining access to HTTP Cookies. Cookies are small nuggets of information which are sent in responses from web servers to the browser. The browser stores this information and will include these cookies in future requests to…
How-to: OpenID Connect Authentication for OAuth
As we know by now, the OAuth 2.0 protocol was built for authorization, not authentication. It excels at delegated authorization. Log in with Google? Sure. The OAuth protected API endpoint never sees your Google username and password. It doesn’t need to know who you are. In fact, like a discreet bouncer at an exclusive club, it prefers not…