API with cloud performance

APImetrics has released the results of its comprehensive annual analysis of the performance of the major cloud service providers serving the critical API landscape. 

To produce the APImetrics API Cloud Performance Analysis Report, APImetrics made more than 187 million API calls to more than 4,200 different API endpoints in 2019 and more than 208 million API calls to more than 4,600 different API endpoints in 2020. Calls were made from 80 different cloud data center locations covering Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud.  

The full report is available online for free at APImetrics API monitoring service API.expert (here). Using the APImetrics API.expert service, users can also sign up and explore the data sets they wish. 

“APIs and the cloud were essential before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and today they’re even more essential for how people work, how they educate, and how they access critical day-to-day services,” said David O'Neill, CEO of APImetrics.  

“APImetrics runs millions of API calls to many of the world’s largest IT providers. It’s the only monitoring provider that does this globally, at scale, across all the major clouds, to give all stakeholders a unique insight into how things are working.” 

In the report, APImetrics have used their unique collection of historical API data to establish a baseline for API quality. The report focuses on a standardized selection of data from leading services. These include APIs from prominent corporate infrastructure providers, financial services institutions, social networks, and search engines.  

Dr. Paul Cray, head of Machine Learning and Standards at APImetrics, said, “The challenge with API monitoring isn’t just being able to get a sample of end-to-end data large enough to be meaningful. It’s also important to understand what it is telling us across lots of different services. Our ability to track performance across cloud providers and geographies is what makes this report unique.” 

Over the five years APImetrics has been tracking cloud performance, there has been a continuous and expected improvement in speed and performance by all the major cloud providers.  

It was assumed that 2020 would be no different until COVID-19 changed the way everybody worked. The data certainly showed the impact but occurring later in the year than might have been expected, with most cloud services degrading in performance in many geographies after the summer of 2020 and almost all the performance gains of the year up to June being eliminated by December. 

“What fascinated us was when things changed,” O'Neill said. “We thought it would slow down in April when offices closed down and people started working from home. But it actually started to bite in July and August.  

“But what’s really amazing is – despite the most dramatic shift in the modern era in the way we work – our data shows that the cloud and IT service providers coped, and coped well.  

“The entire industry should be lauded for how they were able to keep everything running largely without disruption.”