This Week’s API Highlights
- UK in the UK Government API category takes the overall title again this week with a CASC score of 9.76 down from 9.86 last week.
- Department of Justice in the US Government API takes the overall title again with a median latency of 48 ms, the same as last week.
- NHS in the US Government API category is the loser this week with a CASC score of 6.42.
- We take a good, hard look at the performance of a newcomer in the Search API category, Duck Duck Go.
Something of interest
We have added Duck Duck Go to the Search API category (we are planning to add more search APIs in the coming weeks). They came in well behind Google and Microsoft Bing, but with a very respectable CASC score of 9.01. The API is fast and has 100% availability, but is let down by 3.17% outliers. 
Interestingly, we see some big variations between locations in terms of Total Time, but also some unusual behavior. The fastest location is AWS Oceania, but the slowest is another AWS location, East Asia. The second-fastest location is Azure South America and the third Google Oceania, so Duck Duck Go is very much not an API optimized, like so many just for Europe and North America. 
DNS Lookup Time for an API should be 4 ms or 12 ms everywhere. Duck Duck Go manages this in 4 out of 22 regions (plus a couple of 13 ms locations), so an easy win would be to optimize the DNS configuration everywhere. If they can manage 4 ms from AWS Oceania, Duck Duck Go can manage 12 ms or so everywhere. 
TCP Connection Time is blisteringly fast in South Asia, South America and Oceania (except for Azure, which still comes in at a respectable 14 ms). East Asia is the laggard for this API component. 
Handshake Time is again quick in South Asia, South America and Oceania except for Azure. East Asia is even more clearly the slowest region for this component and is obviously the prime area to focus on for improving the performance of the API. Process Time is about the same everywhere except in East Asia. This suggests that Duck Duck Go might not be hosted in that region. This is one reason why you need to actively monitor your APIs. API Performance can vary greatly between regions and for a global API like Duck Duck Go, you can’t afford to letting your users down in East Asia, especially when you can see that you are capable of providing a first rate service from other regions (Oceania, South America, South Asia) that often suffer from poor latency. 
API Analysis: Tops in Overall Quality
Week Ending 29 March 2021
Category
Organization
CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure
GitHub
9.67
COVID-19
WHO