API.expert Monthly API Analysis: February 2021

API Analysis Highlights: February

• GOV.UK in the UK Government category takes the overall top spot for the public sector again with a CASC score of 9.85, up from 9.77 in January.
• Department of Justice in the U.S. Government category takes the overall title for the public sector again with a median latency of 46 ms, down from 47 ms last month.
• Virgin Money in the Open Banking – UK – Production category takes the overall wooden spoon this week with a CASC score of 4.97.
• thevirustracker.com in the Covid-19 category takes the overall wooden spoon this month with a CASC score of 2.31.
• We look at the Social Networks category and the importance of ensuring that your APIs are fully performant for all users in all clouds in all regions.

Something of interest

The Social Networks category is a competitive one in our API analysis. All APIs are well in the Green Zone and 4 out of the 10 have a CASC score of over 9.00. LinkedIn props up the table, but it is still has a fairly respectable CASC score of 8.51. But as ever there is room for improvement.

LinkedIn is fastest for Azure in North America, which makes sense. It is much slower in all other regions, but particularly South Asia. Given LinkedIn’s user base, this seems a non-ideal situation. But Azure is only the fastest cloud in two out of the six regions.

The rate determining step is Handshake Time. This is fast in North America, but much slower elsewhere (Process Time is also quite slow). This is why you need to monitor your APIs actively. Yiu need to see where your APIs are performant and where they are not. You cannot assume that your users are all in one region or using one cloud. LinkedIn needs to look into how to optimize Handshake Time for all regions outside North America.

Etsy is fast from Azure Europe and Azure North America, but pretty slow from all other locations. This suggests an API highly optimized for users from one cloud in two regions.

The rate-determining step is Process Time, but interestingly the fastest location is IBM Cloud in North America, although Azure is almost as fast and AWS and Google in North America are 700 ms slower. Even if you are focused on users in a couple of regions, you can’t assume that all users will necessarily access your service from the same cloud. To provide the optimal service, you need to actively monitor your API to understand the experience all of your users are experiencing regardless of the cloud location.

API Analysis: Tops in Overall Quality

February 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	GitHub	9.62
COVID-19	ubentos.com	9.56
Search	Google	9.31
Social Networks	Google	9.58
UK Government	GOV.UK	9.85
US Government	Department of Justice	9.70
Messaging APIs	Zoom	8.91

Five of the seven categories are topped by an API with a CASC score of over 9.50 in January, up from only 2 in January. GOV.UK in the UK Government category takes the overall top spot for the public sector again with a CASC score of 9.85, up from 9.77 in January. Six of the seven categories are topped by an API with a CASC score of over 9.00 and in 6 out of the 7 categories, the best API has a CASC score of 9.31 or higher, which is a very acceptable level of performance.

API Analysis: Top Performers by Latency

February 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	221 ms
COVID-19	WHO	90 ms
Search	Google	403 ms
Social Networks	Google	57 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	82 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	46 ms
Messaging APIs	Slack	268 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government category takes the overall title for the public sector again with a median latency of 46 ms, down from 47 ms last month.

API Analysis: Worst Quality

February 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Authentication	7.68
COVID-19	thevirustracker.com	2.31
Search	Nobody under 8.00!
Social Networks	Nobody under 8.00!
UK Government	NHS	6.18
US Government	Environmental Systems Research Institute	6.49
Messaging	Nobody under 8.00!

thevirustracker.com in the Covid-19 category takes the overall wooden spoon this month with a CASC score of 2.31. See you again in a month as we assess how matters have gone in March. Also don’t forget to check out our weekly State of the API reports each week and the monthly and weekly financial API reports. We are also releasing reports on the State of the APIs in different categories in 2020, so look out for them too.

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