Helping You Map The Event-Driven Landscape That Exists Across Your API Platform

We spend a lot of time mapping out the world of APIs. We invest resources each day into the continued development of a map of where APIs exist, but also the finer details of how they operate, and the real-time, event-driven nature of how they do what they do. It is important for us to understand what APIs exist out there, but also understand what the most valuable API resources are, and how often they are updated. Working to quantify what is real-time for each API, and what the most meaningful events are that occur via each API platform.

As we work to map out the event-driven landscape of the public API universe we are prioritizing APIs based upon a rating system we have in place, making sure we target the highest-profile, and most valuable APIs first, but we are happy to turn our attention to your platform for a little while. Streamdata.io is happy to provide consulting services to help you map out your API operations, and assist you in developing a better view of your platform, from an external perspective. To help map out your API, we can focus on the following services on your operations.

– APIs.json – Indexing of your entire API operations, documenting all the moving parts of each API’s platform–things like where to signup, the pricing, and terms of service.
– OpenAPI – Craft a machine-readable definition of each individual API’s surface area including the paths, parameters, headers, responses, and other relevant details.
– Polling – Poll an API for over a week, understanding how often things update and change across the available API resources, establishing the base for an event map.
– Stream – Stream an API for the same time as polling, and better understand the performance and efficiency gains that are possible when you stream an API over polling.

All of this work paints a pretty interesting picture of not just the APIs, but the wider operations that support it. The OpenAPI, plus the polling and streaming of each API, illustrates the real-time nature of each API resource and can be used to identify the most meaningful events that are occurring. When you combine this with the proper tagging of each API using OpenAPI definition, you can easily provide clear documentation of the event-driven landscape that exists. This allows you to list APIs by their resource, and sort them by their event activity–providing a listing of events, along with a snapshot of their occurrence, across your platform.

Ok, so why do this? Well, if you look at what platforms like Stripe, Slack, and other leading platforms are working on, you’ll notice they have published a list of the types of events their developers can subscribe to using webhooks. This type of map can be used to plan your webhook infrastructure, which is the beginning stage of evolving any platform towards more of a focus on event-driven architecture. After that, a more publish/subscribe, and streaming reality will be possible, allowing consumers to subscribe to only the topics they want, and receive webhooks, and tap into streams of just the meaningful events that are occurring. Setting the stage for a new type of API consumption around the resources you provide.

If you’d like to learn more about mapping your API platform in this way, feel free to drop us a line. We are happy to turn our attention to your platform for a moment and help you establish a better understanding of how your platform works. Along the way, we think you will learn a lot, and benefit from the overall perspective of your operations that our team can bring.