Struggling to coordinate with third-party API providers for your web app?

In addition to focusing on clear communication and technical alignment, it’s essential to build a proactive partnership with third-party API providers. Instead of just reacting to issues, collaborate closely with their teams to anticipate potential changes or disruptions. Developing a direct relationship can lead to quicker resolutions and early access to beta features or updates. Additionally, diversifying your app’s dependencies—by integrating multiple providers or building modular systems—can help mitigate the risk of relying too heavily on a single API, ensuring your app remains resilient in case of provider issues.

Whenever possible, opt for SDKs provided by the third party. Community-driven SDKs can be less reliable, often leading to maintainability issues. This ensures that updating contracts with the third party is handled by the SDK maintainers. If no SDK is available in your application's language, consider implementing a microservice in a different language that can utilize the SDK. When using this approach, ensure the SDK is kept up to date with the latest version to avoid breaking changes. The vendor should provide adequate notice for any contract changes that aren't backward compatible.

Most up-to Date (example Swagger )documentation with success and error scenarios helps both the teams to reduce back and forth conversations

API documentation is an essential part for seamless integration. With a detailed walk through of an API documentation, one can understand the request params, response structure, error handling, Authentication, Authorization and its limitations as well. Adding to the text documents, I will be super helpful for integrations, if postman collections, Integration videos and sample responses was provided.

Learning to navigate and read API Documentation is almost like learning another programming language. The good news is, once you've mastered a few APIs, it gets easier and easier to grasp and execute on the next one. Even better, you are also learning how to build an API yourself one day.

Imagine, everything is going smoothly with your web app and you are growing your user base daily. Sweet! But on Saturday afternoon customers start to complain that the app is not working. You stop everything you're doing to look at the logs and it is just blowing up with 429 errors. Uh oh! You have scaled beyond your rate limit and your app is not working anymore. It is critical to understand the limitations of the APIs you are using so that your app can respond appropriately as it scales. Rate limits can be based on request volume, request speed, number of authorized API users, or a combination of factors determined by the API provider. Luckily, most API documentation defines the rate limits.

Integrating the third party API into our web application with the behaviour of handling all errors will be more robust. For a few kinds of errors such as 503 service unavailable, 502 bad gateway, it is highly recommended to have retry mechanisms. Once third party integrations are rolled out, then it should be kept into our radar for continuous monitoring to shield our web application for third party failures

API support can vary greatly depending on the provider. Smaller companies or independent API projects might offer little to no support, making them risky to rely on. Large companies like YouTube or Facebook typically provide limited or paid support, often with slow response times and mandatory review periods for certain requests. To avoid disruptions, it's crucial to stay proactive with your API integrations, ensuring you're not overly dependent on external support that could jeopardize your business operations.

Keeping up with API versioning is critical for any app. The best APIs will provide deprecation warnings and give you notice of the changes, others will just pull the rug out from under you. If the provider has a mailing list or notification system for API changes, consider yourself lucky. Most APIs just publish changes on their documentation and it's up to you to keep up with it regularly. GraphQL APIs are the best at handling this because properly designed GraphQL APIs never introduce breaking changes. The typical pattern is to add new fields instead of changing existing fields.