Partner & B2B Integration
External contracts, onboarding, sandboxes and long deprecation windows.
4 to work through
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intermediate
Partner integrations take four months from contract signature to production traffic. Engineering says the work is three days. Where does the time go and how do you cut it?
2 min answer -
advanced
A grocery platform integrates with retail partners whose inventory data varies in freshness, completeness and reliability. How should the integration be designed so one partner's bad data does not degrade the whole platform?
2 min answer -
advanced
An enterprise integration platform connects to many customer identity systems with different reliability and behaviour. How should directory sync, SSO and webhook processing be isolated?
2 min answer -
advanced
You must make a breaking change to an API used by 5000 partner organisations. What is your plan?
3 min answer
3 terms in this topic
B2B Integration
Integrating with partner organisations, where the technical problem is small and the versioning, onboarding and support problems are large.
practiceDeletion Safety Threshold
A refusal to process a deletion batch above some proportion of the population without human confirmation - the control whose absence produces the mos…
practicePartner Onboarding
The repeatable process by which an external organisation is connected, tested and moved to production — and a common hidden bottleneck.
Neighbouring topics
API & Integration
General material on integrating systems through contracts.
REST Design
Resources, uniform methods, status codes and statelessness.
GraphQL
Client-specified queries, N+1 resolution and query-cost control.
gRPC APIs
Contract-first RPC, generated clients and protobuf compatibility rules.
Webhooks
Push callbacks, signature verification, ordering and at-least-once delivery.
API Versioning
URL, header and account-pinned versioning, and who carries the burden.
Backward Compatibility
Which changes are safe, and how to make breakage a build failure.
Contract Testing
Verifying what consumers actually rely on, without a shared environment.
API Documentation
OpenAPI as a machine-checked contract rather than as prose.
Rate Limiting
Algorithms, shared counters, and signalling rejection properly.
Idempotency Keys
Client-generated keys stored atomically with the operation they guard.
Pagination & Filtering
Offset versus cursor, stable ordering and unbounded result sets.
API Error Handling
Error shapes, retryability signals and machine-readable causes.
Event-Driven Integration
Publishing facts rather than commands, and versioning event schemas.
Message Formats
JSON, Protobuf, Avro — schema evolution and payload economics.
Schema Registry
Enforcing compatibility on events the way CI enforces it on code.
Integration Patterns
Routers, translators, splitters, aggregators and dead letter channels.
Legacy Integration
Reaching systems that cannot change, without importing their model.
APIs as Products
Ownership, lifecycle, deprecation policy and developer experience.