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Programming Notes

Trust But Verify...

Sep 25, 20173 min read

Written by

David O'Neill

COO / CCO

David oversees operations and customer success at APIContext, helping enterprise clients get measurable value from API monitoring.

Cloud API Hosting Comparisons One of the ways people use APIContext is to validate what their hosting and hosting optimization services are actually doing versus what they say they are doing. You might have a hosting provider who claims to provide the fastest routing options from A to B, and that's entirely possible, but if their DNS servers struggle with mapping to public locations, or they don't work well with another service which handles IP address routing then you may be wasting your money. We have had customers who've been assured that a service like Akamai are optimizing their routing options only to find, when they test in a structured way that the truth is, as ever, way more complicated. In the example shown, we were running the simplest API server possible and running standard calls between them. We used the same DNS provider for all tests. Initially, one of the services had a consistent set of DNS failures, which were reported to them multiple times over several months. Eventually they accepted there was an issue and 'fixed' the DNS issues. Post fix, they still remained slower. All 5 services were in the same geography and doing the same thing. The moral of the story is that whether you're picking a cloud or using a CDN, trust but verify. For more information on our solutions, why not have a demo of our product?

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