Here's a short tale of 2 API calls. They're both from large, well-known American companies. The API calls are doing exactly the same thing. We won't say what, because that would give the game away – and we don't want to do that. They're not complicated REST APIs. They're pretty simple. Both have security, both calling their respective providers' Sandboxes. Only, one of them is half a second faster than the other. And not only is one faster than the other; one is more consistent, showing almost no variation day-to-day. Bear in mind that these are 'smoothed' averages for [...]

Cloud API Hosting Comparisons One of the ways people use APImetrics is to validate what their hosting and hosting optimization services are actually doing versus what they say they are doing. You might have a hosting provider who claims to provide the fastest routing options from A to B, and that's entirely possible, but if their DNS servers struggle with mapping to public locations, or they don't work well with another service which handles IP address routing then you may be wasting your money. We have had customers who've been assured that a service like Akamai are [...]

Measuring performance from different regions and different clouds is core to what we do and providing developers, managers and product owners with the tools needed to understand what the impact of different locations and clouds is critical.  To help people with this information we've set up a network of HTTPbin servers for developers to use to test against. In each of the seven current Google Cloud regions, we have set up a small f1-micro VM running the HTTPbin API service. They are set up within a shared VPC network, which is fronted by the Google Cloud Load Balancer. They [...]

We've been trying to work out the best way of visualizing latency data by location and we're pleased to announce our first version. We're taking the data for each of the steps of an API call we log; DNS look up, connect time, handshake, processing time etc... and map it to circles of varying sized on a map. The map shows where the data center is and the color of the circle indicates the source - blue for Azure, yellow for AWS, red for IBM and green for Google. The large the circle the longer the measured latency. It's already [...]