API Ratings: Dec 28–Jan 4 | Social Networks

API Performance

Happy New Year! We took a week off last week for the Christmas & New Year holiday, but now we are back at the grindstone.

For our API ratings, we look at over 100 APIs and pull all the metrics together to give you a general feeling for the service quality for an organization’s APIs in a particular API ratings category with our patented CASC score.

Something of interest

Social Networks is a pretty competitive API ratings category with everyone in the Green Zone this week and even the bottom API, LinkedIn, having a perfectly respectable CASC score of 8.58.

The fastest API is Google with a blistering median latency of 56 ms. Etsy is the slowest with a median latency of 842 ms.

Unsurprisingly, Google has very good DNS Lookup Time performance from all clouds and regions. This is, also unsurprisingly, in contrast to Etsy.

Because of the way that DNS works, DNS Lookup Time is typically always about 4 ms from all locations and clouds. This is the case for Google, but very much not the case for Etsy. Only in AWS Europe, North America and Oceania do we see a DNS Lookup Time we would hope to see.

The fact that the AWS DNS Lookup Time is 12 ms across a variety of regions suggests that it should be possible to obtain a quicker time across the other regions and clouds. Looking into the network configuration for Etsy for all clouds and regions should enable an increase in performance for DNS and would be an easy win for improving median latency and API ratings CASC score.

API Ratings: Overall Quality

Week Ending 4 January 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	GitHub	9.60
COVID-19	WHO	9.47
Search	Microsoft Bing	9.47
Social Networks	Google	9.57
UK Government	GOV.UK	9.87
US Government	Department of Justice	9.88
Messaging	Zoom	9.27

Department of Justice in the US Government category takes the overall title again this week with a CASC score of 9.88, up from 9.83 two weeks ago. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Three of the six categories are headed by an organization with a CASC score of 9.50 or more this week. Sustaining a CASC score of >9.25 over a period of several weeks is a good showing and congratulations to those organizations that achieved it. This week, all seven categories are topped by an API with a CASC score of 9.27 or more.

API Ratings: Top Performers by Latency

Week Ending 4 January 2021

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	224 ms
COVID-19	WHO	78 ms
Search	Google	364 ms
Social Networks	Google	56 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	84 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	48 ms
Messaging	Slack	265 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall title again with a median latency of 48 ms, up from 47 ms two week ago. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! An API might have a fast median latency but produce many slow outliers. So just being fast isn’t everything. You have to be reliable too if you want to have good APIs and get a high CASC score!

API Ratings: Worst Quality

Week Ending 4 January 2021

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Nobody under 8.00!
COVID-19	covid19api.com	6.79
Search	Nobody under 9.00!
Social Networks	Nobody under 9.00!
UK Government	NHS	6.09
US Government	Bureau of Labor Statistics	4.64
Messaging	RingCentral (Sandbox)	6.45

Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US Government category takes the overall Wooden Spoon this week with a CASC score of 4.64. Interestingly, two of the seven categories have no-one under 9.00 this week, which is a good effort and could be indicative of long term improvements in API quality. We launched API.expert earlier in the year as a simple way to provide everybody with insights into the API economy and the leading APIs in different categories in particular. We are expanding our coverage of Open Finance APIs from around the world, so one of the major changes we made recently to these round ups has been to pull out the financial APIs. See you again in a week as we plunge further in 2021. Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for December and the weekly and monthly financial API reports.

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