API Speed and Performance: A Guide to Staying In Front of API Performance Problems
By Ryan Pinkham

Speed. Performance. Reliability.

These are the characteristics you strive for when developing, deploying, and maintaining a truly powerful application. These are also the characteristics your customers will use to form their opinions about the performance of that application.

What's the best way to achieve this application performance gold standard?
Through testing and monitoring to ensure that it works - and that it works well, consistently, and that any major bugs or glitches are caught early and repaired before the application (or any updates or releases) is deployed into production.

But in today's connected world, the performance of your application also goes far beyond the applications in front of the software that your teams build and manage. APIs are the glue that holds the connected world together - the means by which various applications and components become interdependent and information is relayed from one device, application, or database to another.

This process can seem trivial at first, since a well-performing API is virtually invisible to your customers, as well as anyone else not directly involved with testing or development. But the opposite is also true - if your API is underperforming, your customers will feel the pain. As such, ensuring the performance of your API is a necessity when building a fast and reliable application.

When an API breaks or malfunctions, your application feels the effects and so do your users.
As our society becomes increasingly fast-paced, even a minor delay is likely to lead users to abandon your application in favor of something else, and word of problems, failures, or availability issues can spread quickly across social media. Your APIs are the backbone of the service(s) your company delivers. They need to perform well in order for your applications to work as desired.

According to SmartBear's State of API 2016 Report - performance is a top priority for API providers, with 74% of providers reporting that performance is the best measure of success for their API.

More impressively, the number of providers who cited performance as their top measure of success outnumbered the total of providers that looked at subscribers, revenue, or retention as their best measure of success combined.