What Is API Performance?

In a digital world where connection speeds are measured in milliseconds, your APIs play a critical role in delivering exceptional user experiences. The number of API requests is growing at a relentless pace, with demand spiking frequently and suddenly. An inability to deliver acceptable API performance ultimately leads to slower systems, lag in response times, poor user experiences, increased downtime, and loss of revenue.

Akamai can help. Akamai API Acceleration is purpose-built for smart, reliable delivery of APIs at scale. With Akamai, you can boost API performance at the edge, scale instantly when demand spikes, and manage and enhance API security more easily.

APIs, or application programming interfaces, are everywhere today. From mobile applications to Internet of Things (IoT) devices and internal applications, APIs support nearly every application and service on the internet in some way.

APIs allow software programs to easily communicate with other applications, products, and services. APIs simplify application development, foster innovation, drive technological integration, and make IT systems easier to manage and maintain. 

Because so many applications and systems depend on APIs, poor API performance can quickly cause bottlenecks, slow response times, and even outages. Many things can contribute to performance issues. Large volumes of API requests or incorrect requests are the primary culprits. Complex queries, misconfigured caching, network latency, or lack of compression can also contribute to application performance degradation.

To ensure that API performance meets and exceeds the needs of the organization, IT teams need application delivery management and acceleration technologies that can optimize routes more efficiently, scale authentication, intelligently cache API responses, and deliver advanced protocol support. That’s exactly what enterprises get with Akamai API Acceleration.

Built on Akamai Connected Cloud, Akamai API Acceleration optimizes API delivery to enable faster and better user experiences across apps and sites. Our solution offloads requests from origin infrastructures and provides a set of acceleration features for large volumes of JSON, XML, and other small payload traffic that are important to superior apps and site experience.

API Acceleration minimizes the impact of network congestion to deliver consistent digital experiences. Maintaining high levels of performance for API traffic requires high reliability and low latency. To achieve this, our technology caches API responses at the edge and serves them from an edge server close to the client making the request, offloading origin infrastructures and delivering faster responses. API Acceleration intelligently routes dynamic content from the origin via an optimal path to ensure the fastest response across a broad variety of network types at different connection speeds. Akamai Connected Cloud can also apply compression to API responses that use text formats when our technology determines that compressing responses will improve performance.

With Akamai API Acceleration, you can:

• Improve API and application performance. API Acceleration enhances application performance and user experiences by using route optimization, API response caching, and scalable authentication to deliver fast and highly available API services.

• Achieve high reliability. A 100% uptime SLA ensures maximum availability of business-critical API traffic.

• Scale rapidly. During spikes and high traffic periods, API Acceleration maintains consistent performance and offloads origin infrastructures.

• Manage costs. API Acceleration reduces the load on origins and maintains predictable cloud infrastructure costs.

• Protect APIs. Akamai secures APIs with scalable origin protection and a singular onboarding workflow.

The features and capabilities of Akamai API Acceleration ensure superior API performance, API availability, and stronger API security.

• Routing optimization. The Akamai edge server performs races to identify the fastest route to origin at any given time, using results to choose the primary route for future API requests.

• Advanced cache control. Akamai intelligently caches API responses and content close to end users and offloads traffic on the origin infrastructure to improve response times.

• Advanced protocol support. Akamai API Acceleration supports HTTP/2 and IPv6.

• Device characterization. Akamai enables organizations to make real-time decisions about key capabilities of a device that is requesting a page, as well as decisions about the optimal web experience for a site visitor.

• Security controls. API Acceleration improves security by moving authentication away from origin infrastructures to Akamai Connected Cloud.

• Encrypted responses. Akamai delivers encrypted API responses to requesting clients via TLS.

• Endpoint security. To improve security posture for API endpoints, API Acceleration can be combined with Akamai App & API Protector for scalable API governance at the edge.