Today, we have sent out our monthly newsletter with a short recap of the latest updates on Bearer.sh. Here's an abstract of what we shared - if you haven't joined the newsletter yet, subscribe at the end of this article.
Circuit breakers were originally designed to protect electrical circuits from damage. Software development has adopted the concept as a type of resiliency pattern and it can now be found commonly in the cloud-native and microservices stacks. They can also be valuable in any codebase that needs to offer more flexibility, especially when relying on third-party APIs. Welcome to Part 1 of this two part series on building a circuit breaker in Node.js.
Have you ever been building an application and thought: "I can make requests to this service's API, but is there a way for them to let my app know when X happens? You could try calling the API on a set interval. Take the response, compare it to the last, and go from there. This is polling, but it is inefficient and can be an easy way to hit rate limits. Instead, some APIs and services offer what's known as a webhook. Instead of contacting them, they contact you.
In our previous post on API Gateways we discussed how services handle external client to service(North-South) traffic. When it comes to dealing with service to service(East-West) traffic it is common to implement a Service Mesh.
What's a gateway? It is an entry point. Things go in. People, traffic, requests. If you've spent any time with microservices, you may have come across the term "API gateway". While not unique to microservices, the API gateway's popularity has grown in the time since their rise. So what exactly is an API gateway?
Bearer's co-founders Guillaume and Cédric are big advocates for remote work. Both have written about the advantages and challenges in the past on the Bearer Blog, but today I want to share some thoughts from our team on what it's like working for a distributed, fully remote company. A few main trends came up. Some expected, and a few surprising.
How resilient is your application? Maybe you've set up a suite of logging tools, an APM, and tests to handle all your own code. What happens when a third-party API goes down? What happens when it stays up, but slows down to the point that your dependent services start to fail? Finding a modern application that doesn't rely on third-party APIs is rare, particularly with the abundance of social login and sharing.
Application performance management (APM) software, sometimes known as application performance monitoring software, is a software as a service (SaaS) type that provides you with a variety of ways to analyze and ensure availability within your application. They can give you metrics in areas such as render times, database load, and failed requests. Modern APM tools are mostly drop-in, all-in-one style solutions. Add a dependency and know everything about why your app is slowing down or crashing.
First, we wanted to wish you a very API New Year. Besides the traditional wishes, we wanted to take the chance to summarize all the great things the team brought to you in 2019... and give you a glimpse into the future.
How does your application handle failure? Your first level of response might focuses on logging and displaying errors, but it merely captures the problem rather than resolving it. What happens if a vital service is offline or under heavy load? What about simply not performing at the standards you might expect? As your application relies more on services that you don't control, like third-party APIs, the need to handle these variables when they arise becomes more important.
