Resources

APIContext resources, reports, and guides.

Explore reports, case studies, ebooks, videos, and infographics on API reliability, resilience, and service quality.

Video

Five 9s, the Elusive Goal

99.999% availability — five nines — allows just over five minutes of downtime per year. It is a widely cited reliability target, but one that most API-dependent services quietly miss.

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Video

APIs and the dirty word of governance

API governance often gets a bad reputation — it sounds like process overhead that slows teams down. But without it, APIs accumulate inconsistencies, break consumer contracts, and create risk that quietly compounds.

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Video

Being Aware of the Impact of API Failures

When an API fails, the visible symptoms — an error message, a failed transaction — are just the surface. The real impact extends through dependent services, partner integrations, and customer journeys in ways that are often invisible to internal monitoring.

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Video

Security in the API Ecosystem

API security is often discussed in terms of authentication and authorization. But in practice, the attack surface extends to undocumented endpoints, behavioural anomalies, and third-party integrations that were never designed with security in mind.

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Video

You Really Don't Know Clouds at All

Cloud platforms promise consistent, global infrastructure. What teams actually get is more nuanced — API latency, availability, and behaviour vary significantly by region, provider, and time of day in ways that internal dashboards rarely surface.

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Video

Connect Times Have Dropped Dramatically

Network connect times for APIs have fallen significantly over the past several years, driven by infrastructure investment and protocol improvements. But the aggregate trend masks real variation across providers, regions, and API types.

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Video

API Authentication: Unhappy paths

Authentication testing usually focuses on the happy path: valid credentials, expected flows, successful responses. But production environments surface the unhappy paths — expired tokens, invalid grants, certificate mismatches, and edge cases that were never tested.

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Video

Lesson 5 of Open Banking APIs: Frogs In Hot Water

Gradual performance degradation is one of the most dangerous patterns in API operations. Unlike sudden outages, slow decay is easy to normalise — teams adjust their expectations, thresholds creep upward, and the problem compounds until it becomes a customer-facing crisis.

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Video

Lesson 4 of Open Banking APIs: Can You Prove It?

In regulated environments, claiming that your APIs meet performance and availability standards is not enough. Regulators, auditors, and sophisticated consumers increasingly expect independent, time-stamped evidence — not just dashboards or internal metrics.

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Video

Lesson 2 of Open Banking APIs: Documentation

API documentation is often treated as an afterthought — written once at launch and rarely updated to reflect how the API actually behaves in production. For Open Banking, where third-party developers and TPPs rely on accurate specifications, this gap creates real friction.

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Video

Lesson 1 of Open Banking APIs: Quicksand

Many Open Banking API programmes launch with confident timelines and then find themselves sinking. The causes are usually the same: underestimated complexity, missing test infrastructure, and assumptions about third-party behaviour that turn out to be wrong.

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Video

How APIContext Observes UK Open Banking APIs

Monitoring UK Open Banking APIs requires more than a simple uptime check. It means handling real AISP and PISP credentials, OBUK certificate authentication, and running from the locations that reflect where consumers and TPPs actually connect.

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Video

Old School Banks vs Cloud Native, API First UK Banks

UK banking has two distinct cohorts: legacy institutions migrating their APIs onto new infrastructure, and cloud-native challenger banks that built API-first from day one. The performance and reliability differences between them are measurable and significant.

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Video

Caroline Lewko of Revere Communications Talks About Developer Experience

Developer experience has become a priority for platform teams, but it is often defined too narrowly — reduced to documentation quality or onboarding flows. Caroline Lewko of Revere Communications argues for a broader definition that includes API reliability, performance, and the quality of the signals developers receive when things go wrong.

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Video

Measuring Performance Where Your Users Are

API performance tests run from a single location tell you how the API performs from that location. For most real-world applications, your users are distributed across geographies, cloud regions, and network paths that produce meaningfully different latency and reliability profiles.

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Video

Latency is Still a Problem

Improved networking, CDNs, and distributed infrastructure have reduced latency for many workloads. But API latency — the accumulated delay across authentication, backend processing, and response serialisation — remains a significant source of user experience degradation.

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Our Recommendations

Based on years of measuring APIs across industries, cloud providers, and geographies, APIContext has developed a set of practical recommendations for teams working to improve API reliability, performance, and governance.

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Video

API vulnerabilities, AI, and Shadow IT

AI-assisted development is accelerating the creation of API integrations across organisations — including integrations that security teams never reviewed, compliance never approved, and operations never knew about. This is shadow IT at a new scale.

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Infographic

Best Practices For API Monitoring

Effective API monitoring goes beyond checking whether an endpoint returns a 200. This infographic summarises the key practices that separate teams with real API visibility from those flying blind.

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Infographic

APIs How They Help Businesses

APIs are the connective tissue of modern business operations — enabling integrations, powering digital experiences, and opening up new revenue channels. This infographic explains the business value of APIs in concrete, accessible terms.

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Infographic

API Security Tips

API security covers a wide range of concerns — from authentication and authorisation to rate limiting, input validation, and monitoring for anomalous behaviour. This infographic highlights the most impactful security practices for teams managing production APIs.

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Infographic

What Is The Right API For You

REST, GraphQL, gRPC, event-driven, and webhook-based APIs each have different strengths. Choosing the right style for a given use case is one of the most consequential early decisions in API design.

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Infographic

7 API Factors That Could Ruin Your Performance

API performance problems rarely come from a single cause. This infographic identifies seven recurring factors that degrade API performance in production — from inefficient authentication flows to third-party dependency latency and poor caching strategy.

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Infographic

API Lifecycle

Managing APIs well requires understanding the full lifecycle: from initial design through development, testing, deployment, versioning, and eventual retirement. Each stage has distinct quality and governance requirements.

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Infographic

What Do APIs Do For You?

APIs are behind most of the digital interactions that businesses and consumers take for granted — from payments to notifications, data synchronisation to third-party integrations. This infographic explains what APIs actually do across a modern digital stack.

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Infographic

APIs For Businesses

APIs drive business value in tangible ways: faster integrations, new product capabilities, partner ecosystem enablement, and more efficient operations. This infographic maps the business case for APIs across different organisational contexts.

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Infographic

6 Benefits Of API Monitoring

Teams that invest in active API monitoring consistently see benefits beyond basic uptime awareness — including faster incident response, better SLA evidence, improved consumer experience, and stronger governance.

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Infographic

Are You Ready To Begin Leveraging APIs

API adoption readiness involves more than technical capability. Organisational readiness — governance structures, security posture, monitoring practices, and partner integration strategy — determines whether an API programme delivers lasting value or creates long-term technical debt.

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