API & Integration

General material on integrating systems through contracts.

4Questions

15Flashcards

13Terms

Drill this topic All of API & Integration Architecture

Questions

4 to work through

intermediate Multiple choice

You are designing APIs for a platform with a web app, a mobile app, internal service-to-service traffic and third-party partners. What do you expose, and where?

2 min answer
advanced

A multi-product SaaS company exposes REST APIs, webhooks, an app marketplace, OAuth-scoped integrations and embedded plugins. Which integration surface creates the most long-term architectural constraint, and why?

2 min answer
advanced

An authentication provider's API is on the critical path of thousands of applications. What does that dependency position demand architecturally?

2 min answer
advanced

You run a communications API of Twilio's shape, whose customers' businesses stop when you are degraded. An enterprise customer wants a contractual per-endpoint p99 latency SLA written into their renewal. Walk me through your answer.

3 min answer

Terminology

13 terms in this topic

case-study

Amazon 2002: The API Mandate

A directive that all teams expose functionality only through service interfaces, with no back doors, is widely credited with making both Amazon's arc…

pattern

API Gateway

A single entry point in front of a set of services that handles authentication, rate limiting, routing and protocol translation.

concept

Backward Compatibility

The property that a new version of a producer continues to work with clients written against the old version.

practice

Enterprise Integration Patterns

A catalogue of named, composable messaging patterns — router, translator, aggregator, splitter, filter, dead letter channel — that gives integration …

protocol

GraphQL

A query language and runtime where the client specifies exactly which fields it needs, against a typed schema, usually via a single endpoint.

protocol

gRPC

A contract-first RPC framework using Protocol Buffers over HTTP/2, with generated clients and servers and first-class streaming.

pattern

Idempotency Key

A client-generated unique value sent with a request so the server can recognise a retry and return the original result instead of acting twice.

case-study

LinkedIn and the Origin of Kafka

Kafka was built to replace point-to-point data integration between many systems with a single durable log that any system could publish to and any nu…

tool

OpenAPI

A machine-readable specification format for HTTP APIs, from which documentation, clients, servers, mocks and validation can be generated.

pattern

Rate Limiting

Bounding how many requests a caller may make in a window, to protect capacity and enforce fair use.

protocol

REST

An architectural style for APIs built on resources identified by URLs, manipulated with uniform HTTP methods, and stateless requests.

case-study

Stripe's API Versioning

Stripe pins each account to the API version current when it integrated and transforms requests and responses between versions internally, so integrat…

pattern