Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

An application programming interface (API) is a set of rules and protocols that enables different software applications to communicate and share data and functionality. The concept of an API has been around for a long time. However, APIs as you know them emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of the internet and web-based services. As more businesses began to offer online services, the need for a standardized way for these services to interact and share data became apparent.

No matter what application you’re building and who your target customers are, everyone can agree that it’s critical to avoid broken deployments. To aid in this goal, many tools and concepts have been invented, with Kubernetes preview environments being one of them. In this post, you’ll get a deeper understanding of how preview environments work, how organizations are using them, and how you can get started yourself.

Testing in production is one of the most effective—and risky—ways of testing. The ability to use real-world conditions ensures reliability of tests, as no bugs can appear as a result of misconfigurations of the environment. However, using the same environment as your users also has an obvious downside: any bugs discovered by testing will immediately affect users.

HAProxy Technologies is proud to unveil the 2.7 release of HAProxy Data Plane API. This release was a huge undertaking, and as with the 2.6 release, we focused on extending support for configuration keywords. We are happy to announce that with this release we support all HAProxy configuration keywords in the Data Plane API. Along with enhanced keyword coverage, we’ve added the ability to specify multiple named defaults sections through the API.

Accessorizing can completely turn around your look. Same way, the apps we make may also feel patchy sometimes, but then, if we bring in third-party resources - such as third-party API integrations, it can drastically enhance our application’s performance. These additional API integrations expand the functionality of your application tremendously, for example, you might add a real-time alerting feature to an analytics tool you built!

We have recently added the API Monitoring feature to Serverless360 and this opens up a wide range of monitoring opportunities. The principle of API Monitor is that you have an API endpoint that you want Serverless360 to periodically call and then you will make assertions against the response to check if the API is healthy or not.

As your experience and knowledge of a system grow, change becomes inevitable. Your application requirements change, your bug fixes require code changes, and your APIs evolve. A key challenge in the software ecosystem is managing changes—especially when they concern APIs. Because you’re likely using APIs in multiple applications, you must document all updates and changes made to your APIs. This is where API versioning becomes crucial.

Today we continue on our journey towards being API-first with two new updates – non-expiring tokens and regenerating API keys. As you may have seen, late last month we made the exciting announcement about the launch of our Public API. Delivering a world-class API is a core focus here at Raygun. We’re on a mission to give you greater control over how you can extract, manipulate, and visualize the powerful insights surfaced in Raygun, so that you can use them in exciting new ways.