Best practices for API Integration
summary
Survey of 50 companies finds 90% use third-party APIs and many scale to 30–50 integrations, revealing key pain points: diverse protocols and auth flows, poor or noisy webhooks, credential sprawl and rotation failures, lack of logging/latency data, and mounting technical debt from embedded SDKs. Recommended practices are concrete: enforce an SDK policy (avoid provider SDKs unless they offer substantial extra functionality), isolate API calls into microservices or modules, log request payloads/status/latency with filtering, and feed those logs into monitoring and alerting so each integration isn’t a silent single point of failure.
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chapters (26)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:25API integration definition
- 0:49Bearer history
- 1:41The API is a tale of two worlds
- 2:25Who builds API integration
- 3:07Do you consume APIs
- 3:30Why use APIs
- 3:42API first product
- 4:24The new partnership
- 4:46Most companies start this way
- 5:11What doesnt accelerate their growth
- 6:20We all build integration
- 6:39API diversity
- 9:46Every API is different
- 12:08Single point of failure
- 12:29Questions to ask yourself
- 13:27Update and security issues
- 13:49SDK apology
- 14:23Retry mechanism
- 15:05Credentials
- 16:15Code Isolation
- 16:29Microservices
- 17:42Logging
- 19:07Monitoring
- 20:01Monitoring and alerting
- 20:16Reactive
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