APIContext has released its 2024 Cloud Service Provider API Report, an annual global analysis of the performance of major cloud service providers serving the critical API landscape. The report looked at data generated from 650 million API calls to more than 10,000 different API endpoints from more than 100 geographically diverse cloud data center locations, across major public cloud service providers, including AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM.
The global results show that, in 2023, only 7% of API Services achieved a 99.99% service availability score, a significant drop from 18% in 2022. Achieving 99.99% is the benchmark all API service providers should be aiming for, says the report, while 99.999% is the traditional telecommunications standard for service availability – equating to five minutes of downtime in a year.
Reasons for the drop in service availability can be attributed to rapid growth in the cloud ecosystem (20% in the past 12 months), making it difficult for cloud service providers to continue scaling hardware at the necessary rate as consumption growth.
Other key report highlights include:
- Cloud API performance varies by geography: in terms of API speed, North America is the fastest region in 2023, 500 milliseconds (ms) faster than Oceania which ranked last in fifth while Europe placed second.
- Four of the top five locations for Time to Connect are Amazon AWS locations: this is the duration it takes an API to process a request and return a response to the client. Amazon AWS continues to be the flag bearer for optimizing network operations and managing traffic flow across systems to ensure speed, which resulted in AWS in Asia, Europe, North America and Oceania all placing in the top 5.
- IBM is the fastest cloud by Total Time: this is the overall time from when the request enters API Management (APIM) until the response is sent back to the client. IBM averages 443 ms while AWS is second with 450 ms. Azure landed at the bottom with 529 ms.
