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APIs account for 83% of all internet traffic, and 90% of developers use APIs in their daily jobs in one way or another, which confirms the saying that ‘APIs are eating the world’ and that we live in the API economy era.

In their report on the state of API design, usage, and performance in 2023, Anatomy of an API 2023,an APIOps platform Treblle looked at 9,000 APIs from various industries and analyzed one billion API requests.

Understanding API Design and Performance

• The average API boasts 22 endpoints, with a trend towards microservice-oriented architectures.
• GET and POST are the most widely used HTTP methods, indicating a focus on information retrieval
• The study reveals a substantial presence of ‘zombie endpoints’, which pose security risks due to lack of maintenance.
• Success responses (2xx) dominate the HTTP response codes, with client errors (4xx) being four times more prevalent than server errors (5xx).
• Popular SDKs for API development include Laravel and NodeJS, reflecting the widespread use of PHP and Javascript

Other findings include a remarkable 96% growth of AI APIs compared to 2022. This marks the change of APIs from simple data carriers into intelligent, adaptive interfaces capable of learning. It also means the creation of more intuitive and user-centric applications.

Integration of APIs and AI also poses some risks and calls for more focus on data privacy, ethical considerations, and security. Security is, the study finds, still a critical challenge in API development. A concerning 51% of API requests lack authentication , and 55% carry a medium threat level.

API Trivia

• Wednesdays experience the highest volume of API requests
• In terms of time, the highest volume of API requests happened in Q3
• The United States leads in API request volumes, with Ashburn, Virginia, being the global hotspot due to AWS’s data centers.
• The average API has 22 endpoints.
• 20% of API endpoints remain unused for over 30 days
• Client-side errors are four times more common than server-side errors in API interactions.

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