Benchmarking Web API Quality – Revisited

Authors

  • David Bermbach TU Berlin & Einstein Center Digital Future, Mobile Cloud Computing Research Group, Berlin, Germany
  • Erik Wittern IBM, Hybrid Cloud Integration, Hamburg, Germany

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13052/jwe1540-9589.19563

Keywords:

Web APIs, Benchmarking, Quality of Service

Abstract

Modern applications increasingly interact with web APIs – reusable components, deployed and operated outside the application, and accessed over the network. Their existence, arguably, spurs application innovations, making it easy to integrate data or functionalities. While previous work has analyzed the ecosystem of web APIs and their design, little is known about web API quality at runtime. This gap is critical, as qualities including availability, latency, or provider security preferences can severely impact applications and user experience.

In this paper, we revisit a 3-month, geo-distributed benchmark of popular web APIs, originally performed in 2015. We repeat this benchmark in 2018 and compare results from these two benchmarks regarding availability and latency. We furthermore introduce new results from assessing provider security preferences, collected both in 2015 and 2018, and results from our attempts to reach out to API providers with the results from our 2015 experiments. Our extensive experiments show that web API qualities vary 1.) based on the geo-distribution of clients, 2.) during our individual experiments, and 3.) between the two experiments. Our findings provide evidence to foster the discussion around web API quality, and can act as a basis for the creation of tools and approaches to mitigate quality issues.

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Author Biographies

David Bermbach, TU Berlin & Einstein Center Digital Future, Mobile Cloud Computing Research Group, Berlin, Germany

David Bermbach is an Assistant Professor at TU Berlin and is heading the Mobile Cloud Computing research group at the Einstein Center Digital Future in Berlin, Germany. In his research, he focuses on benchmarking as well as platforms and applications for cloud, edge, and fog computing. He holds a PhD in computer science and a diploma in business engineering, both from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Erik Wittern, IBM, Hybrid Cloud Integration, Hamburg, Germany

Erik Wittern is IBM’s GraphQL Lead Architect, and works on bringing GraphQL support to IBM’s API Management products. Prior to his current role, Erik spent five years as a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. His research in the field of Software Engineering focuses on web APIs, their discovery and use, and the evolution of new API models like GraphQL. Erik holds a PhD in computer science from Karlsruhe Institute Of Technology.

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Published

2020-10-25

How to Cite

Bermbach, D. ., & Wittern, E. . (2020). Benchmarking Web API Quality – Revisited. Journal of Web Engineering, 19(5-6), 603–646. https://doi.org/10.13052/jwe1540-9589.19563

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