RapidAPI: API Marketplace with Iddo Gino

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Building software was simplified by cloud providers. With the cloud, it became much easier to deploy a server, spin up a database, and scale an application. Cloud providers like AWS gave developers access to these infrastructure primitives like storage and compute.

On top of those primitives, numerous API companies have been built. An API company offers a more specific set of services. Twilio offers SMS text messaging API services. Stripe offers payment API services. These APIs give developers another level of tooling to build software out of.

Developers can now think of entire applications in terms of APIs, and the number of APIs is growing rapidly. From business services such as booking a flight to machine learning models like image classification, the “API economy” has given developers a huge catalog of tools.

Since developers have this additional leverage, software can be built with smaller teams. The codebase can also be smaller. But one area where the complexity is growing is the number of APIs that need to be managed. For each API, there is a different system for integrating the API into your application. Different API providers have different levels of reliability.

Another area of difficulty is the discoverability of APIs. If I don’t know about a flight search API, I am never going to think of what applications I could build on top of that. There are APIs for generating memes, and APIs for easily querying what music is trending across the world.

RapidAPI is a marketplace for APIs. It includes search and discovery features for the wide variety of different APIs that can be found across the internet. RapidAPI is also a system for integrating with multiple APIs through it’s API management system.

Iddo Gino is the CEO and founder of RapidAPI, and he joins the show to discuss the motivation for creating an API marketplace, as well as the engineering behind RapidAPI.

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