Mashery

If you are in operations or engineering in a technology business, you can probably still remember most of the details of the worst outage you’ve managed through.  That cold sweat moment when your monitoring systems starts alerting, your phone starts vibrating and beeping, your adrenaline hits and all you can think of is logging on (despite prior commitments to the kids, wife and/or dog).  You’re trying to get shell access, but the systems are overloaded and it’s taking for-e-ver.  Instant messaging starts lighting up with messages from your guys.  Your boss is calling on your cell phone amongst the flurry of SMS messages.  You try to block out all the noise because you just need time to start figuring out what’s happening.  Ugh. External load. Out of capacity.  Now what?

This past week, Twitter broke new volume records, but also broke another record, poor availability for their API. As someone responsible for a product’s availability, I feel for the team over there.  I can just about feel the stress level and the fatigue of the guys in the trenches.  I’m sure they did awesome work managing through it and need a break… but here comes another big weekend for them: World Cup Quarterfinals and Tour de France.  *Sigh*.  Ops guys are heroes.  They deserve their nicotine, caffeine, beer and doughnuts.

All of this has me thinking about what we do at Mashery.   We spend a lot of time thinking about all aspects of running successful API programs, from strategy, to developer outreach, to launches to operations.  We’ve learned a lot about running programs in a variety of different industries and environments.  Watching what happened to Twitter over the past week makes me think of a few operational lessons I’ve learned over the years.

Rate limiting and throttling is necessary.

Some will call foul on this since you’re effectively turning away business, but it’s reality.  I wish there was such a thing as infinite capacity.  Even if you have the good fortune to have tons of it, make sure you still have a way to hit the panic button and rate limit if necessary.  Twitter has one of the world’s biggest APIs, and when they broke their volume record due to the World Cup, throttling traffic is what allowed them to stay afloat.  It can happen on a 100 QPS API or a 3200 QPS API.  And really people, have a way to do this outside of modifying your code.  When you need the panic button, you shouldn’t be calling engineering and worrying about whether the build is good.

Separate traffic and developer management from your backend API servers.

APIs are different than websites.  With your website, you mostly know things like concurrent connections and bandwidth.   When you max capacity, there’s not a ton you can do but start adding or turn some things off for everybody and ride out the wave.  But if you’ve done it right with an API and have traffic controls with developer management in front of your API, you have a shot at managing the wave rather than just hoping it dies down.

Firstly, having a traffic management layer allows you to limit load on your backend while you try to login and troubleshoot your situation.  If you use a service like Mashery, you can apply maintenance blocks, turn off certain less important endpoints/methods, or even just throttle back how much traffic you’ll accept while politely blocking the rest with fast response error messages.

Secondly, an API done right has a developer management component in your front edge.  With this in place, you actually know which developers/partners/applications are sending you traffic and you can make more focused decisions.  In Twitter’s case, they didn’t pick and choose who would get the most capacity (as far as we know publically).  Instead, they chose a general ratcheting down of access rights to all developers in their community; probably the right political choice for them to make.

For lots of other companies though, not all developers or partners are created equal.  In this situation, picking which applications to allocate the most capacity to might be critical.  A retailer may need to ensure specific applications are 100% available on cyber-Monday. Maybe you need to manage specific contractual obligations if you have a pay-for-access API with SLAs.  Or maybe a certain app is launching on iTunes today and you want to protect its success.  Having the visibility into developer specific traffic and the ability to throttle or limit each independently is necessary in these situations and requires this component on your front edge.

Additionally, in a moment of purely coincidental yet serendipitously beneficial timing, Mashery announced yesterday the expansion of our traffic and developer management capabilities with the release of API Access Tiers. This enables our customers even more capability to help them easily group their developer partners to easily prioritize traffic given their business objectives. When that panic button is needed, you can make simple UI driven decisions for whole tiers of developer partners.

While we’re advocates of using API analytics to plan capacity and avoid outages all together, the reality is that unplanned for events happen.  Having tools in place for managing traffic is a great way keep business running smoothly and help ops guys get home to their families.  After all, that’s a worthwhile cause.

- Chris Lippi, VP of Product and Operations

API Access Tiers Leverage Digital Assets in Web and Mobile Applications

San Francisco, CA, June 30, 2010—Mashery, the leading provider of API (Application Programming Interface) management and strategic services, today announced new API access tiers, a platform that allows publishing and media companies to provide varying levels of access to their digital assets to internal, partner and third-party developers. API access tiers create a foundation for opening up content to the public or based on established business relationships, providing a viable framework for media companies to monetize online data.

The global publishing industry is facing rapid changes to content delivery models. New devices are being launched every day that allow consumers to get more of their news on the go, and these mobile devices are achieving mainstream adoption much quicker. Just this year, the Apple iPad sold 2 million units in the first 60 days—and Apple reports that a new iPad is sold every three seconds. Media companies need to adapt their content delivery strategies to keep up with constant innovation and early adoption. Managing a reliable, easy-to-use API portal is a cost-efficient solution that allows media companies to take advantage of application development and revenue stream opportunities from the global developer community.

The Guardian newspaper based in the U.K. is using Mashery’s new API access tiers to provide its digital assets to developers and partners through “Open Platform”—the Guardian’s API portal that includes more than 1 million archived articles, picture galleries, podcasts and videos. Partners can access and reuse the Guardian’s content to reach a wider audience, engage users more deeply and produce innovative advertising campaigns. In return, the company can develop new partnerships and expand its reach and its business models through those partnerships. Mashery’s API management service provides the Software as a Service (SaaS) platform necessary to cost-efficiently manage, monitor, monetize and control access to the newspaper’s APIs.

“The ability to provide varying levels of access to our archives is critical in developing a distributed partner model,” said Matt McAlister, head of the Guardian developer network. “We rely on Mashery’s expertise to manage and monitor access rights. As a result, we are able to offer a very robust product that creates new opportunities for us and for our partners.”

Deborah Schultz, Partner Innovation & Design at the Altimeter Group commented, “The early successes and adoption of the iPad, smart phones and other mobile readers are pushing publishers and media companies to think about how they can open up their content to partners and developers to help them expand distribution to these new devices. But access is only part of the story. Media needs to explore new monetization opportunities to leverage this expanding ecosystem”.

Mashery understands that managing APIs is an ongoing process of registering and provisioning new developers while keeping an eye on performance and responding to support requests from the developer community. Any one of these tasks can be time consuming for even just a single partner. When the number of partners grows to dozens, hundreds or thousands of developers, suddenly the job of managing APIs quickly exceeds the bandwidth of most media and publishing companies. In response, Mashery provides a Web-based service that simplifies partner access, monitors API activity for stability and performance and collaborates with and supports developer communities.

“Innovations in mobile technology have fundamentally changed the basic principles of media distribution. Media companies excel at creating content, but most do not have the in-house resources or expertise to keep up with all the new business development opportunities being created through application development and new platforms,” said Oren Michels, CEO, Mashery. “Instead of using resources to try to manage APIs, API access and a variety of partner relationships, publishing and media companies can now focus on what they do best: creating content. Mashery’s API management and strategic services allow them to do just that and with a clear path to revenue creation.”

About Mashery
Mashery’s API management tools and strategic services help companies connect with customers and partners in a changing digital world by extending reach across devices, markets and the Web. Mashery leads the industry with a holistic approach for API initiatives—from setting platform strategy and measuring business objectives to the heavy lifting of providing and managing infrastructure to facilitating relationships with our 50,000-strong network of Web and mobile application developers. Our knowledge, experience and proven strategies enable companies to focus on their core business while driving sales, building new revenue channels and realizing faster time-to-market for innovative applications. Mashery was founded in 2006 and has built an impressive list of clients that include Best Buy, Netflix, and The New York Times. For more information, visit www.mashery.com.

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Over the past few months I’ve thought a lot about the future of the news business. Mashery has several great customers who provide and distribute news and who have developed great APIs to increase their reach and, ultimately, increase their revenue.

Much has been written about this topic, with some news providers warning us that unless people pay for news content no one will be able to afford to staff a Baghdad bureau, investigative journalism will end, and society will suffer. I’m a huge fan of great journalism. I understand its important role in our world.

But like other media and entertainment, it is clear that the business model has to evolve. I believe it will evolve in a way that in the vast majority of cases explicitly separates news gathering and content creation from distribution.

This trend began a long time ago. The traditional big-city daily paper had bureaus around the world, covered all the local news, and created an inexpensive and efficient distribution channel for local delivery. Over time, it became more efficient to share resources for some of the broader national and international news, and to allow the local experts to share local stories of national interest with papers published elsewhere. Hence the wire services.

Thus the big-city dailies became a mix of internally generated content and syndication of externally generated content. The financial success resulted from the economic benefit of a strong local distribution capabilities coupled with cost sharing on gathering national and international news.

Blogs and citizen journalism notwithstanding, I would argue that the economics of newsgathering have not changed a lot. Good journalism requires talent and experience, and the money to pay for professionals to research, write and edit.

But the economics of distribution have changed dramatically.

Much of the debate on the news business seems to take as axiomatic that production of the news and its distribution must remain vertically integrated for the business to survive. I believe the opposite is the case.

Fred Wilson made an excellent point in a post this morning:

If the front page of NYTimes.com linked to everything interesting on the web instead of just their own stories, they could play the same game. I understand the organization reluctance to do that, but I wonder if they have any other choice.

I totally agree. I think we’ll see things evolve in a similar way to the motion picture business:

• Originally, there was the “studio system”. Studios hired actors, made them stars, hired writers, produced movies, marketed them and distributed them. The studios had very strong brands.

• Over time, the production and distribution divisions of the major studios began to separate. Independent producers began to package and produce content which would be distributed by either major studios’ distribution arms, or by independent distributors.

• “Talent” became free agents. Some would join together on a project-by-project basis, set up their own production companies, or commit to work with a particular distributor or production company in exchange for the financial support needed to conceive and develop projects.

• Meanwhile, the studios’ distribution divisions use their economies of scale to market and distribute a mix of films produced by their production divisions and films produced by third parties. Some of those third-party films receive production financing from the studios, while others are “picked up” once they’re completed.

• Today, we have a complex ecosystem of big-budget studio-financed films, independent art films, and everything in between. But the era of the vertically integrated studio system ended decades ago.

If the news business is to survive, production and distribution must be decoupled. The strong national brands will likely be able to play on both sides, just as the major studios do, but even there the production and distribution divisions will need to be autonomous.

Meanwhile, we’re going to see new business models in which newsgathering and production can be done efficiently and profitably, and distributors will figure out how to make money while providing the necessary economic incentive for the producers.

News producers who are opening APIs and experimenting with a variety of syndication business models are likely to lead the way. Those that aren’t are sitting on the sidelines and hoping that when the innovators “crack the code” they’ll still be able to jump in and join the party. By then, it will likely be too late.

Reposting of Oren Michels’ Praxis blog from Aug 16, 2009