API Reliability: Going Beyond Just Measuring Uptime

The text discusses the importance of considering factors beyond just uptime when assessing the reliability of a system that uses a remote API. It highlights how LaunchDarkly, an API provider for feature flags, focuses on maximizing availability by trading off consistency and minimizing the possibility of network partitions. The company leverages CDNs like Fastly to cache content and reduce the number of required network calls, while also implementing caching in their SDKs to further improve reliability. The text emphasizes that measuring reliability should involve considering metrics such as baseline error rates, median + 90th percentile response times, and failure mode under load, rather than just focusing on uptime alone.