SEATTLE, August 29, 2023 – APImetrics, the industry authority on API quality, governance, and performance, announced today that poor API performance is costing the industry as much as $92 billion each year.
The statement comes from the yearly APImetrics report on cloud API performance. In 2022, APImetrics analyzed over a billion API calls to more than 8,000 different API endpoints from 100 geographically diverse cloud data centers across Amazon (AWS), Azure, Google, and IBM.
“Overall, the companies we monitor do have high availability and uptime, but that’s not the whole story,” said David O’Neill, APImetrics CEO. “We measured an average of nine incidents per endpoint per month, meaning the time and money spent on investigating errors add up.”
Deeper analysis showed that poor-performing APIs require 2.5x more support than performant APIs, as measured using the patented APImetrics CASC score and customer interviews. The $92 billion price tag is based on engineering effort at a global cost of USD $75 per hour, meaning the costs for G7 onshore-based companies could be much higher.
“Any API will have issues every month, but the difference between the top performers and poor performers was significant considering that most companies have hundreds, if not thousands of endpoints they rely on,” said O’Neill.
“While we’re not surprised that it affects the bottom line, the total of over $90 billion was revealing. It only proves that APIs are more critical than ever to a company’s success and in these times where costs are under scrutiny, companies can hardly afford to waste additional resources when they should instead be focused on the root causes.”
Several factors can contribute to poor API quality, including high latency, outages, and engineering or architecture issues. However, a company’s choice in cloud provider and location continues to be the most impactful.
“Where and how an API is hosted can significantly affect operational performance, and end-user performance as well,” O’Neill said. “It’s hard for API providers to deliver successfully to their customers when the problem is not the API itself, but something external like the cloud host.”
APImetrics delivers the annual report on cloud API performance to highlight the critical role APIs play in almost every aspect of modern life.
“From logging into a website to smart lightbulbs, bank transactions, and transportation infrastructure, people and businesses rely on hundreds of APIs every day,” said O’Neill. “They’re too important not to be featured as a point of success, or failure, in a company’s bottom line.”
APImetrics is focused on making the data available to wider audiences and giving everyone a way to understand their cloud exposure and the risks they might face with their architectures. The API Directory, launching this month on the APImetrics website, will be the first step at making the data publicly available.
The company has made available an infographic to further emphasize the importance of the statistics surrounding API performance. It is available for download in PDF form on the company’s website.
“We can’t pretend the business landscape hasn’t changed,” O’Neill said. “APImetrics is here to give people real understanding of how to optimize their cost base and understand that they are getting value for money.”
APImetrics is building out the next generation of API monitoring, governance, and observability tooling to make APIs better, more secure, and of higher quality.
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