research-article

The role of limitations and SLAs in the API industry

Authors:

Antonio Gamez-Diaz,

Pablo Fernandez,

Antonio Ruiz-Cortés,

Pedro J. Molina,

Nikhil Kolekar,

Prithpal Bhogill,

Madhurranjan Mohaan,

Francisco MéndezAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE 2019: Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 1006 - 1014

https://doi.org/10.1145/3338906.3340445

Published: 12 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

As software architecture design is evolving to a microservice paradigm, RESTful APIs are being established as the preferred choice to build applications. In such a scenario, there is a shift towards a growing market of APIs where providers offer different service levels with tailored limitations typically based on the cost.

In this context, while there are well established standards to describe the functional elements of APIs (such as the OpenAPI Specification), having a standard model for Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for APIs may boost an open ecosystem of tools that would represent an improvement for the industry by automating certain tasks during the development such as: SLA-aware scaffolding, SLA-aware testing, or SLA-aware requesters.

Unfortunately, despite there have been several proposals to describe SLAs for software in general and web services in particular during the past decades, there is an actual lack of a widely used standard due to the complex landscape of concepts surrounding the notion of SLAs and the multiple perspectives that can be addressed.

In this paper, we aim to analyze the landscape for SLAs for APIs in two different directions: i) Clarifying the SLA-driven API development lifecycle: its activities and participants; 2) Developing a catalog of relevant concepts and an ulterior prioritization based on different perspectives from both Industry and Academia.

As a main result, we present a scored list of concepts that paves the way to establish a concrete road-map for a standard industry-aligned specification to describe SLAs in APIs.

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Cited By

Serbout SEl Malki APautasso CZdun U(2023)API Rate Limit Adoption -- A pattern collectionProceedings of the 28th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs10.1145/3628034.3628039(1-20)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628034.3628039
Quiña-Mera AFernandez PGarcía JRuiz-Cortés A(2023)GraphQL: A Systematic Mapping StudyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/356181855:10(1-35)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3561818
Alonso JMartin-Lopez ASegura SGarcia JRuiz-Cortes A(2023)ARTE: Automated Generation of Realistic Test Inputs for Web APIsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.315061849:1(348-363)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3150618
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The role of limitations and SLAs in the API industry
1. Information systems
  1. World Wide Web
    1. Web services
      1. RESTful web services
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. System description languages
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Extra-functional properties

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cover image ACM Conferences

ESEC/FSE 2019: Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 2019

1264 pages

ISBN:9781450355728

DOI:10.1145/3338906

General Chairs:
Marlon Dumas
University of Tartu, Estonia
,
Dietmar Pfahl
University of Tartu, Estonia
,
Program Chairs:
Sven Apel
Saarland University, Germany
,
Alessandra Russo
Imperial College, UK

Copyright © 2019 ACM.

© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 August 2019

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ESEC/FSE '19

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SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE '19: 27th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

August 26 - 30, 2019

Tallinn, Estonia

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Overall Acceptance Rate 112 of 543 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

Serbout SEl Malki APautasso CZdun U(2023)API Rate Limit Adoption -- A pattern collectionProceedings of the 28th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs10.1145/3628034.3628039(1-20)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3628034.3628039
Quiña-Mera AFernandez PGarcía JRuiz-Cortés A(2023)GraphQL: A Systematic Mapping StudyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/356181855:10(1-35)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3561818
Alonso JMartin-Lopez ASegura SGarcia JRuiz-Cortes A(2023)ARTE: Automated Generation of Realistic Test Inputs for Web APIsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.315061849:1(348-363)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3150618
Malki AZdun U(2023)Combining API Patterns in Microservice Architectures: Performance and Reliability Analysis2023 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS)10.1109/ICWS60048.2023.00044(246-257)Online publication date: Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICWS60048.2023.00044
Fresno–Aranda RFernández PDurán ARuiz–Cortés A(2023)Semi-automated Capacity Analysis of Limitation-Aware Microservices ArchitecturesEconomics of Grids, Clouds, Systems, and Services10.1007/978-3-031-29315-3_7(75-88)Online publication date: 31-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29315-3_7
El Malki AZdun UPautasso C(2022)Impact of API Rate Limit on Reliability of Microservices-Based Architectures2022 IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE)10.1109/SOSE55356.2022.00009(19-28)Online publication date: Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/SOSE55356.2022.00009
Benouaret KAgoun JBenouaret ICharoy F(2022)Call Limit-Based Composite Service Selection2022 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS)10.1109/ICWS55610.2022.00021(37-46)Online publication date: Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICWS55610.2022.00021
Martin-Lopez AArcuri ASegura SRuiz-Cortes A(2021)Black-Box and White-Box Test Case Generation for RESTful APIs: Enemies or Allies?2021 IEEE 32nd International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE)10.1109/ISSRE52982.2021.00034(231-241)Online publication date: Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE52982.2021.00034
Gamez-Diaz AFernandez PRuiz-Cortés ADumas MPfahl DApel SRusso A(2019)Governify for APIs: SLA-driven ecosystem for API governanceProceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3338906.3341176(1120-1123)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3338906.3341176
Gamez-Diaz AFernandez PRuiz-Cortes A(2019)Automating SLA-Driven API Development with SLA4OAIService-Oriented Computing10.1007/978-3-030-33702-5_2(20-35)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33702-5_2

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