0

The demand for realtime APIs

 1 year ago
source link: https://devm.io/api/realtime-api-reduce-complexity
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
neoserver,ios ssh client

Realtime API Family helps us to reduce complexity

The Demand for Realtime APIs

Looking to 2020 and beyond, the proportion of data produced and consumed in realtime is growing exponentially.

IDC predict that by 2025 1/3 of all data produced globally will be realtime. The engineers and organizations that make up the realtime ecosystem, Ably included, have yet to agree on how we describe the APIs we’re creating and consuming that are powering this growth. The problem is that there are various ways to describe APIs that provide realtime functionality.

API evangelist Kin Lane, and many others, have been writing and talking about these new types of APIs for a while. Event-driven seems to be the most common descriptor. Gartner has adopted the term, stating that by 2020 50 % of all managed APIs will be event-driven. But still today there is no consistency or consensus between what terms like realtime API, event-driven API, or streaming API refer to. Often they’re used interchangeably.

As an engineering team and API provider working on a global pub/sub messaging platform, we work with these ideas everyday. Talking to our users we see the language they use to describe both what we do and what they achieve using our APIs. And we’ve watched discussions around event-driven architecture, webhooks, and streaming data proliferate. Over the years we’ve thought extensively about the best terminology to use and arrived at what we call the Realtime API Family.

Defining realtime

When it comes to realtime in the context of user interaction, it can be defined as a function or interaction perceived as immediate. As a concept in this context then, realtime is easy enough to understand. Ably defines it as anything that happens in under 100ms as this is typically the threshold for perceiving something as happening immediately.

Any API designed such that data flowing from producers to consumers happens in the shortest amount of time possible can therefore be described as realtime.

Ably has settled on realtime API as an umbrella for event-driven, streaming, pub/sub, push, and other APIs. We’ve seen many more than four ways of describing this, but these are the most popular. It’s why we call it the Realtime API Family (Figure 1).

Image-1-Realtime-API-Family.png

Fig. 1: Realtime API Family

Streaming APIs

A stream is a means of transporting data. Streaming is a consumer pattern that describes how consumers receive events through a stream.

A streaming API will commonly address issues of data integrity with:

  • Message ordering – ensure messages are delivered in the order they were published
  • Stream ...

report

Recommend

About Joyk


Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK