Mission-critical apps that are deployed on the cloud drive today's modern enterprises, which in turn power their businesses. These applications' fundamental units are microservices, which tiny development teams created to enable speedy feature releases to the market. APIs serve as the ties that bring these microservices together so they can cooperate.

The holiday shopping season is one of the most stressful periods for operators of retail and ecommerce businesses, as the seasonal surge of holiday shoppers can put massive amounts of stress and strain on even the most well-architected websites. Here’s a recent example from 2021: The Office Depot website suffered an outage during Cyber Monday that knocked the online shop offline for hours, impacting the ability of customers to place orders online.

I joined Checkly a few months ago, and because our platform enables you to use Microsoft’s Playwright to run your synthetic monitoring, I started getting my hands dirty with the end-to-end testing framework. I’m a massive fan of learning in public, so I started publishing weekly Playwright tips on YouTube. Did you miss a few videos? Don’t sweat it! Here’s the first collection of Playwright tricks I discovered over the last few months.

Properly testing a service’s APIs to ensure that it can handle production traffic presents many challenges for engineers—SREs need to guarantee the resiliency of their application, while developers must ensure that their features perform well at any given scale. Speedscale is a testing framework built for Kubernetes applications that enables you to load test with real-world production scenarios by replaying actual API traffic that your application has experienced.

Content management is shifting toward two headless options: Git-based and API-driven. Headless CMS solutions allow developers to edit and manage content easily while still using the front- and back-end tools and platforms they know and love. These Git-based and API-driven CMS solutions give developers a new way to expedite CI/CD processes without compromising product quality. Git is an essential tool for both beginners and seasoned software developers.

In 2021, we partnered with AWS to develop the Datadog Lambda extension which provides a simple, cost-effective way for teams to collect traces, logs, custom metrics, and enhanced metrics from Lambda functions and submit them to Datadog.

The Lambda Telemetry API empowers users to integrate monitoring and observability tools like Site24x7 with their Lambda functions. Site24x7 is an AWS-reviewed Lambda Service Ready Program Partner and is announced as a launch partner in AWS Lambda Telemetry API feature release. Customers, AWS partners, and the serverless community can use the Lambda Telemetry API to receive telemetry streams from the Lambda service, including function, extension logs, and metrics coming from the Lambda platform.

Back in 2020, we covered the launch of Lambda Extensions and the subsequent release of the Lambda Logs API. These features aren’t designed for the average Lambda user. But they allow vendors to build better tools by giving them much-needed access to the Lambda execution environment.

You can now use Checkly to monitor API endpoints secured with TLS Client Certificates. This post dives into why and how you would use client certificates and mTLS (Mutual TLS) in your API infrastructure. Let's go!

AWS recently introduced a new Lambda Telemetry API giving users the ability to collect logs, metrics, and traces for analysis in AWS services like Cloudwatch or a third-party observability platform like Coralogix. It allows for a simplified and holistic collection of observability data by providing Lambda extensions access to additional events and information related to the Lambda platform.

Maintain high uptime and performance for your APIs without any overheads using Google Cloud’s API monitoring tools.

I have been building a feature on elmah.io lately that picks up validation results from an external API. Before serverless was a thing, I would probably have done this using a scheduled task or Windows Service using Hangfire or similar. But after having migrated everything to serverless Azure Functions, I wanted a good solution running similarly. Azure Durable Functions turned out as the perfect companion and in this post, I'll show you a possible way to implement polling of an asynchronous API.

API is short for Application Programming Interface. The software-to-software interface provides a secure and standardized way for systems to work with each other. API security means implementing practices that protect APIs from malicious attacks and data theft. Thanks to APIs, applications can deliver the information or functionality requested without user intervention. This means our everyday digital experiences remain virtually effortless.