Idempotency in Your API

Introduction Idempotency is a crucial property in the world of APIs, ensuring that operations can be applied multiple times without changing the result. In this post, we’ll explore six effective strategies to achieve idempotency in your API, drawing inspiration from real-world examples and distributed systems principles. Idempotency Explained The light switch analogy is often used to explain idempotence. Consider a light switch in a room. The operation of turning the light switch on or off is idempotent. If the light is initially off and you flip the switch to turn it on, flipping it again won’t turn the light off again—it stays on. ...

November 11, 2023 · 4 min · Denis Nutiu

Tracing Node.js APIs with OpenTelemetry

Hello everyone 👋, In this article, we’ll instrument a simple Node.js API with OpenTelemetry traces. OpenTelemetry is the new standard for distributed tracing and metrics. Trace data is used to monitor and troubleshoot complex distributed systems. At the end of this article, we’ll have a Node.js API that is instrumented with OpenTelemetry and we’ll be able to see the traces in Grafana Tempo: The API Let’s start by setting up our NodeJS project by installing the dependencies: ...

August 7, 2023 · 7 min · Denis Nutiu