Better APIs: Quality, Stability, Observability

Master the art of building high-quality, stable, and observable APIs with this hands-on guide—perfect for developers and architects looking to elevate their API game and ensure their projects are reliable, maintainable, and scalable.This book is a practical guide to improving the quality, stability, and observability of your APIs. Through a combination of theoretical insights and a hands-on example project, you'll learn how to create and maintain production-grade APIs that meet high standards of excellence. Better APIs: Quality, Stability, Observability is designed for developers and architects who want to deepen their understanding of API development and ensure their APIs are reliable, maintainable, and easy to monitor.APIs are the backbone of modern software architecture, and ensuring they are of high quality, stable, and observable is critical to the success of any software project. This book provides you with the tools and knowledge to create APIs that meet these criteria, helping you avoid common pitfalls and ensuring your APIs can scale and evolve over time.Among other things, you'll learnHow to build APIs that are well-architected, secure, and maintainable.Strategies for ensuring the stability of your APIs, allowing them to withstand external pressures and internal changes without compromising their core functionality.Techniques for enhancing observability, giving you the tools to monitor and understand your API's behavior in real-time, ensuring it's performing as expected.Practical methods for implementing continuous integration and deployment, automated testing, and proper documentation to support your API's lifecycle.How to apply these concepts to a real-world project, using the example of a fictional scenario to demonstrate best practices and common pitfalls.Authored by Mikael Vesavuori, an experienced software architect and developer, this book is not just a theoretical exploration but a practical guide that will help you improve your API... Copyright Found anything wrong? Introduction What will you learn? Why should you care? Prior art Project resources Workshop Scenario Workshop assignment How to follow along Commands Prerequisites My solution pitch The application Tech Technical components Architecture diagrams Solution diagram Deployment diagram Microservices API documentation Fake user Feature toggles Weighing between a hardware- or a software-oriented approach The benefits of hardware-segregated environments The drawbacks of hardware-segregated environments The benefits of a software-defined, dynamic environment The drawbacks of a software-defined, dynamic environment Yes, you can mix these patterns with a hardware-separated environment Quality Make your processes known SOLID principles Clean architecture Baseline tooling and plugins Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment Refactor continuously (“boy scout rule”) Trunk-Based Development Test-Driven Development Generate documentation Unit testing (and more) Creating coverage, fast Test positive and negative states Test automation in CI Synthetic testing Automated scans Generate a software bill of materials Open source license compliance Release versioned software and produce release notes Stability Lifecycle management and roadmap API schema API schema validation API client version using headers Branch by abstraction Beta functionality Feature toggles (“feature flags”) Authorization and role-based access Canary deployment How we can do better Observability AWS baseline observability Structured logger Alerting Service discoverability and metadata Additional observability Setting up Bunyan as a logger Going even further with MikroLog, MikroTrace, and MikroMetric References and resources Books Articles and online resources Video Thank you for reading this book Master the art of building high-quality, stable, and observable APIs with this hands-on guide—perfect for developers and architects looking to elevate their API game and ensure their projects are reliable, maintainable, and scalable. This book is a practical guide to improving the quality, stability, and observability of your APIs. Through a combination of theoretical insights and a hands-on example project, you’ll learn how to create and maintain production-grade APIs that meet high standards of excellence. Better APIs: Quality, Stability, Observability is designed for developers and architects who want to deepen their understanding of API development and ensure their APIs are reliable, maintainable, and easy to monitor. APIs are the backbone of modern software architecture, and ensuring they are of high quality, stable, and observable is critical to the success of any software project. This book provides you with the tools and knowledge to create APIs that meet these criteria, helping you avoid common pitfalls and ensuring your APIs can scale and evolve over time. Among other things, you’ll learn: How to build APIs that are well-architected, secure, and maintainable. Strategies for ensuring the stability of your APIs, allowing them to withstand external pressures and internal changes without compromising their core functionality. Techniques for enhancing observability, giving you the tools to monitor and understand your API’s behavior in real-time, ensuring it’s performing as expected. Practical methods for implementing continuous integration and deployment, automated testing, and proper documentation to support your API’s lifecycle. How to apply these concepts to a real-world project, using the example of a fictional scenario to demonstrate best practices and common pitfalls.