API series - Push: REST easy, APIs transformed into streaming data feeds
Real-time data streaming and messaging solutions company Push Technology has enriched its Diffusion Cloud service.
Described as an intelligent event-data platform, the additions include a new REST adapter and improved data monitoring capabilities.
REpresentational State Transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that describes a uniform interface between physically separate components, often across the Internet in a client-server architecture.
As Red Hat reminds us, “REST is a set of architectural constraints, not a protocol or a standard. API developers can implement REST in a variety of ways.”
Push APIs into streaming data
Over on the decks at Push, the team says that development teams can quickly provide real-time experiences to customers by transforming existing APIs into streaming data feeds, without the need to re-architect backend systems.
With Diffusion doing the heavy lifting of distributing real-time data, developers can reduce traffic load on backend systems – resulting in consistently fast performance and reduced infrastructure requirements. In addition, developers now have the ability to specify custom headers/query parameters – which are necessary for polling authenticated APIs.
Diffusion Cloud offers monitoring improvements that now make it easier for Ops teams to understand how their cloud services are being used, identify anomalous behaviour and proactively respond to any potential issues before they impact end users.
“Using the Cloud version of our Diffusion platform development teams can take an economical, fast, low-code approach to build real-time event-driven applications,” said Andréa Skov, chief marketing officer for Push Technology.
Out-of-the-box adapter
Skov points to capabilities here including an out-of-the-box adapter to pull data from external REST API endpoints and into Diffusion. Developers can configure integrations with external REST APIs through the Diffusion Cloud Dashboard, or programmatically via Diffusion’s Management API.
There is also live graphing and visualisation of key usage metrics for ‘at a glance’ service status. Also, we find more granular reporting of usage
Skov: Transforming APIs into streaming data feeds is a simple push, it’s real good.
history, allowing fine-grained trend analysis and diagnostics.
Users can also enjoy features that highlight of usage thresholds and high/low summaries to inform capacity planning.
In summary, the redesign enables users to manage existing APIs and add new sources. It provides customers with greater visibility of their service’s live metrics and historic usage trends, with the dashboard overview now displaying live metrics for a number of Connections and Topics.
New graphs display Connection and Message usage over the past hour/day/week/month and summary data points are now shown (minimum/maximum connections, total number of messages and bytes).
The Diffusion Intelligent Data Platform is used to build innovative new applications as well as extend legacy systems.
Diffusion consumes, enriches, and delivers data with optimal efficiency, in real time at high volume, and includes secure dynamic access control, easy to use APIs, and flexible deployment models to meet each organisation’s specific business requirements – in the cloud, on-premises and in hybrid environments.