Advice for Operating a Public-Facing API

Oliver Lowe@lemmy.sdf.org to Programming@programming.dev – 61 points –
jcs.org

An OpenBSD developer and the one-man-band behind Pushover gives some advice after 10 years of running a public HTTP API. It's interesting as big companies are happy to publish articles about all the fancy stuff they developed to run some API, but you don't always hear from a sole developer running a service for such a long time.

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Interesting article, thanks for sharing!

I've run a (nowhere near as popular) public API for just about 10 years now. Definitely relate to the bit where he mentions people simply retrying the same request when they get an error. 😂

I get a lot of students using the API for learning projects, which is great! But it also means my rate limiting is more often protecting my server from accidental infinite loops, rather than anything purposely abusive.

some esoteric devices and plugins don't support them. In fact, some don't even support HTTP POST properly and will only be able to put form parameters in the URL query string (though you still need to insist on requiring a proper POST method, don't be an animal).

This gave me a chuckle. Good, practical advice for smaller APIs. Bigger orgs are likely to have distributed tracing etc but for a one man show it’s good to have input on what’s proved actually useful and necessary.