API Ratings: Oct 19-26 | Foursquare Takes the Title

October has come and gone, and the clocks are falling back around the world. Let’s talk about API ratings over the last seven days.

But before we do, a quick programming note:

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. Look out for the separate weekly and monthly reports on financial APIs.

Now, onto what the past week tells us about the world’s non-financial API ratings as we dive into the results as we head towards the election and/or the end of the world.

API Ratings: Headlines

We look at over 100 APIs, but pull all the metrics together to give you API ratings in a particular category.

Top API Ratings

Week Ending 26 October 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	GitHub	9.67
COVID-19	covid19api.com	9.28
Search	Foursquare	9.04
Social Networks	Google	9.68
UK Government	Police.UK	9.52
US Government	Department of Justice	9.87

Department of Justice in the US Government category takes the overall API ratings title yet again this week with a CASC score of 9.87, the same as last week. A CASC score of over 9.00 is very good and one of 9.50 or more exceptional. Four of the six API ratings categories are headed by organizations 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!

Top API Ratings by Latency

Week Ending 26 October 2020

Category	Organization	Median Latency
Corporate Infrastructure	Microsoft Office	227 ms
COVID-19	CDC Tools	154 ms
Search	Facebook	340 ms
Social Networks	Google	59 ms
UK Government	Police.UK	92 ms
US Government	Department of Justice	52 ms

Department of Justice in the US Government takes the overall title again with a median latency of 52 ms, the same as last week. An important caveat: medians can be misleading! An API might have a fast median latency but produce many slow outliers. These won’t affect the median, but they mean that users can experience many calls that were unacceptably slow. So just being fast isn’t everything. You have to be reliable too if you want to have good API ratings!

Worst API Ratings Overall

Week Ending 26 October 2020

Category	Organization	CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure	Nobody below 8.00!
COVID-19	thevirustracker.com	6.78
Search	Nobody below 8.00!
Social Networks	Nobody below 9.00!
UK Government	NHS	6.83
US Government	Department of Labor	5.82

Yikes!

Something of interest

Foursquare took the title in the Search API ratings category this week, but only by 0.02 points from both Microsoft Bing and Facebook and 0.03 points from Google. That’s an incredibly tight race! The CASC score is a blended metric for API ratings. If different APIs have exactly the same values of the input metrics, they will have the same CASC score, but it is possible, as we see here to have the same or very close CASC scores with different input metrics. Facebook and Microsoft Bing both have 100% pass rates. Facebook though has more outliers, but Microsoft Bing is a good deal slower (nearly 250 ms). Interestingly, for both Microsoft Bing and Facebook, the worst location is IBM Cloud Oceania, both of which have a median latency of over a second. There might be many users using Microsoft Bing and Facebook from IBM Cloud Oceania, but those who do will be experiencing a significantly degraded experience. All of your users are important and you don’t want any of them to have a poor service, especially in cases in which the poor service is caused by cloud interconnection issues that can often be resolved through a little light reconfiguration. And having big variations in latency between clouds and locations increases the standard deviation of the latency and thus reduces the CASC score. It’s by actively monitoring your APIs from the locations where your users are that you can understand what performance they are really experiencing and you can work to ensure that the experience is getting better all the time. See you again in a week as we look at API ratings over a crazy time in history. Also don’t forget to look out for our monthly report for September and the weekly and monthly financial API reports!

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