This Week’s API Highlights
- Department of Justice in the US Government API category takes the overall title this week with a CASC score of 9.81.
- Department of Justice in the US Government is the fastest API again with a median latency of 49 ms up from 48 ms last week.
- Environmental Systems Research Institute in the US Government API category takes the overall bottom spot again this week with a CASC score of 5.95, down from 6.52 last week.
- We take a good hard look at Microsoft Bing and whether there might be any low-hanging fruit.
Something of interest
Microsoft Bing won the Search API category this week by just 0.02. It’s the slowest API in its category, but it has by far the fewest number of outliers at just 0.12%. 
Microsoft Bing is the fastest from Azure in four out of the six clouds. You want to make the most of home advantage. Being slower than AWS in North America, in particular, is slightly embarrassing. 
DNS Lookup Time is always the low hanging fruit in terms of optimizing the performance of your API. If it’s not 4 ms or 12 ms from all cloud locations, there’s something wrong. Microsoft Bing manages 12 ms from three locations, all Azure (there’s also a 13 ms from AWS East Asia). This is why you need to be actively monitoring your APIs. You need to know what your DNS Lookup Time (and the other latency component) is from the end-user perspectives so that you can proactively ensuring that you are providing an optimal service. That’s clearly not the case for AWS users in Oceania – or Azure ones in East Asia. There are hundreds of milliseconds of latency to be squeezed out there. 
This is no purely theoretical proposition. If Google can do it, Microsoft Bing can do it. Google does indeed have a DNS Lookup Time of 4 ms or 12 ms from all cloud locations. If they can do it, Microsoft Bing can do it. 
For AWS North America, it’s the TCP Connection Time and the Handshake Time, meaning that Microsoft Bing APIs are faster from there than from Azure. 
That’s 21 ms in extra latency alone from Azure, so plenty of opportunity, once DNS Lookup Time is sorted, to deal with the secondary causes of degraded latency. 
API Analysis: Tops in Overall Quality
Week Ending 26 April 2021
Category
Organization
CASC score
Corporate Infrastructure
GitHub
9.60
COVID-19
WHO