How to Talk About APIs

APIs are powering and empowering software innovation as they enable new use cases on top of existing services. Observability into API usage to answer questions like: how APIs are called, what APIs do, where APIs fail, where APIs are slow, where APIs are misused … has to be on top of mind for architects that decide to build or use APIs.In this episode we welcome Sonja Chevre, Group Product Manager at Tyk, who recently gave a captivating talk at KubeCon about using OpenTelemetry to get insights into popular API frameworks such as GraphQL. We are discussing common challenges for SREs such as that APIs often hide the status of a call behind an HTTP 200 or that debugging individual calls is really hard as details of the call are not exposed by default to telemetry data. We also cover topics such as API-led growth, API as a product as well as open standards such as OpenTelemetry and OpenAPI. Here the list of discussed links during the show:

• KubeCon Talk: https://kccnceu2023.sched.com/event/1HyVc/what-could-go-wrong-with-a-graphql-query-and-can-opentelemetry-help-sonja-chevre-ahmet-soormally-tyk-technologies
• API Management vs Gateway discussion: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sonjachevre_apimanagement-apigateway-apisecurity-activity-7061596404854521857-N_cO/
• API as a Product: https://tyk.io/blog/unlocking-the-potential-of-api-as-a-product/
• OpenAPI: https://www.openapis.org/
• OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/