Marc Andreessen famously said, “Software is eating the world.” Dr. Steve Willmott subsequently retorted, “APIs are eating software.” This is because API based architectures are enabling companies to get away from monolithic architectures and move to microservices. Innovative, disruptive companies like Netflix, Airbnb, Uber, Square, and Slack all build their infrastructure and technology using APIs.

No matter which path of the stack you work on, it’s crucial you make sure your website or API is up and running. We wanted to create a tool that can give you superpowers. Enter, Sematext Synthetics! You can monitor the availability of APIs and websites as well as their performance, and user journeys. This means 24×7 monitoring from multiple locations around the globe with alerts when things go wrong!

REST has reigned for a long time in the world of web services. It’s easy to implement, allows standardization through RESTful patterns and has lots of libraries that support and facilitate its development. Then came GraphQL, the famous query language for APIs.

We recently wrote about whether API Gateway can act as a Load Balancer. The answer is yes and, in many cases, they are substitutes for each other. But how should we choose which one to use? In this article, we will dive into more details on how these two types of HTTP networking services compare, using the AWS services as a base level: API Gateway and Application Load Balancer (ALB). Both are highly-scalable services to a point that scalability should not be a concern for most use cases.

Alerting is central to your website, web application, and API monitoring. Getting the right message to the right people is essential to quickly resolving outages and error states. In this article, we walk you through seven aspects you need to consider when setting up the alerting for your monitors. If you need a general overview of how alerting works within Uptrends, we have a Knowledge Base article and an Academy course you may want to visit.

Exciting times ahead. With the Jamstack gaining momentum, the landscape around it is offering more and more tools to streamline developer workflows and free up time for actual development. A cutting edge solution in this interesting space is Vercel, formerly known as ZEIT. In this blog post we will get a taste of Vercel's capabilities by using it to deploy and preview a sample Gatsby blog - and while we're at it, we will of course take the chance to kick off some checks automatically from Checkly.

In this week’s Tip Tuesday, we are focusing on API monitoring. APIs are a set of rules or standards, which extend the functionality of an application, allowing different applications and/or programs to interact. These little helpers are built with flexibility and ease of integration in mind. APIs simplify programming, allowing developers to build complex applications without having to worry about usability.

The most common API architecture on Serverless backends is not necessarily the most scalable and resilient option. Many developers take for granted that an AWS Lambda processing external requests will require an API Gateway endpoint connected directly to it. One of the best options to decouple a Lambda function and an API Gateway endpoint is by using an SQS queue. Requests come into API Gateway, which are sent as messages to SQS.