Integration and Observability of 3rd Party APIs

Eyal Solomon, CEO and Co-Founder of Lunar.dev, talks about integrating, controlling, and observability into 3rd party APIs and services. We discuss the trade-offs of integrating a 3rd party API and how it impacts simplicity and potential loss of insight.

SHOW: 803

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SHOW NOTES:

• Lunar.dev (homepage)
• Lunar.dev blog
• Lunar.dev on TechCrunch

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before diving into today’s discussion, tell us a little about your background.

Topic 2 - Controlling 3rd party APIs is increasingly becoming an issue for many organizations. As the world gets built on APIs, consumption of another company's APIs to ingest services is critical. But, this leads to all sorts of control and potentially cost issues. Please give everyone an introduction to the problem.

Topic 3 - Does this mean 3rd Party APIs are a tradeoff? Yes, you might be able to integrate APIs for a payment system for instance quickly, or maybe the latest AI SaaS service, but in doing so won’t an organization potentially lose oversight? Where do most organizations run into problems first? This reminds me of the early days of cloud and people leaving instances running and then getting huge bills and not knowing until it was too late. Is this similar?

Topic 4 - We’ve seen a lot of products and companies tackling the issue of internal company APIs, but not 3rd party APIs. Once an organization determines they have a problem, maybe an observability problem, perhaps a cost problem, maybe a compliance issue, etc. how would they get started gaining API observability and control in their org? 

Topic 5 - Is this a solution that sits in traffic flow? Does this potentially introduce latency? Is this almost like a WAF for 3rd party APIs? What kinds of policies or restrictions can be put in place?

Topic 6 - What are some of the most common use cases you’ve seen and how do you solve them? What business decisions have to be made if they decide to restrict access in some way?

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