SE Radio 663: Tyler Flint on Managing External APIs

Tyler Flint, CEO of qpoint.io, joins host Robert
Blumen for a conversation about managing external vendor
dependencies, including several best practices for adoption. They
start with a look at internal versus external services, including
details such as the footprint of external services within a
micro-services application, and difficulties organizations have
tracking their service consumption, quantifying service
consumption, and auditing external services. Tyler also discusses
the security implications of external services, including
authentication and authorization. They examine metrics and
monitoring, with recommendations on the key metrics to collect,
as well as acceptable error rates for external services. From
there they consider what can go wrong, how to respond to external
service outages, and challenges related to testing external
services. The episode wraps up with a discussion of qPoint’s
migration from a proxy-based solution to one based on eBPF kernel
probes.


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