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