API.expert Weekly API Analysis: Google Workplace APIs

This Week’s Highlights

• UK in the UK Government category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.76, the same as last week.
• Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall title again with a median latency of 46 ms down from 48 ms last week.
• Data.gov in the US Government category takes the overall bottom spot this week with a CASC score of 3.37.
• We take a good look at Gmail and what it is doing right and wrong.

Something of interest

Corporate Infrastructure API is a large and important category and we are constantly striving to add new APIs to it. We have recently began monitoring Google Workplace APIs.

Corporate Infrastructure is a pretty competitive category with 10 out of 23 APIs having a CASC score of over 9.00. Gmail props up the table with a CASC score of 8.42.

That’s respectable enough, but is there anything it could do to improve matters?

Gmail is only fastest from Google in East Asia and North America. That suggests that some optimization towards its home cloud is needed.

Europe and North America are fast, but the other regions slow suggesting that co-hosting the services in additional regions would be valuable.

This is why you need to actively monitor your APIs. Gmail is a global service. It’s not acceptable to 563 ms of additional latency between your users in AWS Europe and IBM Cloud Oceania.

DNS Lookup Time should be 4 ms or 12 ms everywhere. Gmail manages 4 ms in 4 locations out of 22 and 12 ms in 5. This is an easy win. Oceania Azure, Google(!), and IBM Cloud have 121 ms of extra latency from DNS Lookup compared to AWS.

Handshake Time is fastest or equal fastest from Google, so Gmail finally leveraging its home cloud. Google is much quicker than the other clouds in East Asia and North America.

Is there something that can be learned from the network configuration for those regions?

Process Time is the rate-determining step. It is only 16 ms for Google Europe compared to 305 ms for Google South Asia or 338 ms for AWS Oceania.

It’s by actively monitoring your APIs from the end-user’s perspective that you can see exactly how an API is really behaving.

For a global service like Gmail, you really need to work to ensure that performance is as uniform as possible for all users regardless of their cloud and region.

API Analysis: Tops in Overall Quality

Week ending 5 April 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Slack	9.54
COVID-19	WHO	9.52
Search	Google	9.30
Social Networks	Google	9.71
UK Government	GOV.UK	9.76
US Government	Department of Justice	9.76
Messaging APIs	Slack	9.38

GOV.UK in the UK Government category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.76, the same as last week.

API Analysis: Top Performers by Latency

Week Ending 5 April 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Google OpenID Connect	94 ms
COVID-19	WHO	91 ms
Search	Duck Duck Go	134 ms
Social Networks	Google	54 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	68 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	46 ms
Messaging APIs	Slack	261 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall title again with a median latency of 46 ms, down from 48 ms last week.

API Analysis: Worst Quality

Week Ending 5 April 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Nobody under 8.00!
COVID-19	covid19api.com	5.85
Search	Nobody under 8.00!
Social Networks	Nobody under 8.00!
UK Government	NHS	6.34
US Government	Data.gov	3.37
Messaging	Nobody under 8.00!

Data.gov in the US Government API category takes the overall bottom spot this week with a CASC score of 3.37. Four out of the seven categories don’t have an API that appears in the list because there is no API in that category outside the Green Zone, the same as last week. See you again in a week as we plunge further into April. Also, don’t forget to look out for our monthly API report for March and the weekly and monthly financial API reports. We will also be publishing special reports on the State of the APIs in the 2020, so that’s something else to look forward to!

Do more with API monitoring!

If you are new to APImetrics, sign up for a free trial so see how they could work for you with our free API set.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.