I talked about Google's shift towards providing an SLA across their cloud services last week, and this week I'd like to highlight APIMetric's Cloud API Service Consistency (CASC) score, and how it can be applied to determine if an API is meeting their SLA or not. APIMetric came up with the CASC Score as part of their APImetrics Insights analytics package, and has shown been very open with the API ranking system, as well as the data behind.
The CASC score provides us with an API reliability and stability ranking for us to apply across our APIs, providing one very important layer of a comprehensive API rating system that we can use across the industries being impacted by APIs. I said in my story about Google's SLAs that companies should have an API present for their APIs. They will also need to ensure that 3rd party API service providers like APIMetrics are gathering the data, and providing us with a CASC score for all the APIs we depend on in our businesses.
I know that external monitoring service providers like APIMetrics, and API ranking systems like the CASC score make some API providers nervous, but if you want to sell to the enterprise, government, and other critical infrastructure, you will need to over it. I also recommend that you work hard to reduce barriers for API service providers to get at the data they need, as well as get out there way when it comes to publish the data publicly, and sharing or aggregating it as part of industry level rating for groups of APIs.
If we want this API economy, that we keep talking about to scale, we are going to have to make sure we have SLAs, and ensuring we are meeting them throughout our operations. SLA monitoring helps us meet our contractual engagements with our customers, but they are also beginning to contribute to an overall ranking system being used across the industries we operate in. This is something that is only going to grow and expand, so the sooner we get the infrastructure in place to determine our service level benchmarks, monitor and aggregate the corresponding data, the better off we are going to be in a fast-growing API economy.
