Co-written by: Atoosa Rezai, Senior Technical Account Manager at Akamai Technologies. \r\n Companies of all sizes and in every industry use APIs for a staggering range of activities. Just a few examples: APIs make it easy to include weather forecasts in apps , recommend driving routes where you are least likely to have an accident , and allow banks to comply with open banking regulations . \r\n But there are difficulties: similar to general web traffic, APIs also use the HTTP/ HTTPS protocol to transfer information between servers and clients. This means that the delivery, reliability, and scalability challenges that websites face are also challenges for APIs. \r\n Let’s look at a typical API call to understand how each of these challenges can have a detrimental impact on your APIs. It starts with an API consumer making a GET request to an API endpoint which connects to an API server that, in turn, requests a resource from a database server (see diagram below). That’s when the challenges begin.…