Latency, Availability, and Error Budgets for APIs
Set API latency and availability objectives, calculate error budgets, and use service level indicators to guide practical reliability trade-offs.
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Structured Logs, Metrics, and Correlation IDs for APIs
Instrument API integrations with structured logs, service metrics, and correlation IDs so teams can trace failures without exposing secrets or personal data.
API Mocks, Sandboxes, and Test Data
Use API mocks, sandboxes, and safe test data to develop integrations predictably while preserving realistic errors and protecting sensitive information.
Partial Failure, Ordering, and Eventual Consistency
Understand partial API failures, message ordering, and eventual consistency, then design status models and recovery paths clients can reason about.
Rate Limits, Quotas, and Consumer Fairness
Set fair API rate limits and quotas with clear scopes, useful headers, burst handling, and protection against noisy consumers and accidental traffic spikes.
API Request, Response, and Error Shapes Clients Can Trust
Design consistent API request and response envelopes, validation errors, and problem details so client developers can handle success and failure reliably.
API Resource Names, Relationships, and Collections
Model API URLs around stable resources and relationships, with clear collection behavior that clients can navigate without learning server internals.
Retries, Timeouts, Backoff, and Circuit Breakers
Set API deadlines, bounded retries, exponential backoff, and circuit breakers so transient failures recover without multiplying load or hiding outages.
API Scopes, Roles, and Object-Level Permissions
Compare API scopes, roles, and object-level permissions, then combine them to grant callers only the access each operation and resource requires.
Unit, Integration, and Contract Testing for APIs
Build an API test strategy with fast unit tests, realistic integration checks, and consumer contract tests without relying on brittle end-to-end suites.