API Management Best Practices Questions and Answers for Viva

Answer-1: Logging records API calls, errors, and system events for troubleshooting and audit purposes.

Answer-2: To understand usage patterns, detect anomalies, and optimize API performance.

Answer-3: Synchronous APIs return responses immediately; asynchronous APIs return responses after processing, often via callbacks or queues.

Answer-4: By using standard HTTP status codes and providing descriptive error messages.

Answer-5: To avoid breaking existing clients and ensure smooth transitions.

Answer-6: Mocks simulate API behavior to enable frontend and backend development in parallel.

Answer-7: Proxies act as intermediaries to enforce policies and abstract backend changes from clients.

Answer-8: It standardizes API description, enabling automated documentation and client generation.

Answer-9: By using automated tests, integration tests, and tools like Postman or SoapUI.

Answer-10: Throttling is the act of controlling the usage dynamically, while rate limiting is the set limit on the number of calls allowed.

Answer-11: By rotating keys regularly, restricting their permissions, and using secure storage.

Answer-12: Service Level Agreements define expected uptime and performance metrics for API consumers.

Answer-13: By implementing data encryption, access controls, and minimizing data exposure.

Answer-14: APIs often expose microservices; managing them ensures modularity, scalability, and security.

Answer-15: By implementing authentication, authorization, rate limiting, and anomaly detection.

Answer-16: Combining multiple API calls into a single aggregated response to simplify client interactions.

Answer-17: By notifying users in advance, providing migration paths, and eventually removing old versions.

Answer-18: It helps ensure that APIs meet performance and availability commitments.

Answer-19: By deploying APIs across multiple regions and using failover mechanisms.

Answer-20: Webhooks allow APIs to push real-time notifications to clients instead of relying on polling.

Answer-21: By enforcing consistent policies, secure communication channels, and strong access controls.

Answer-22: They provide a centralized inventory of available APIs for discovery and governance.

Answer-23: Automation enables continuous integration, deployment, testing, and policy enforcement.

Answer-24: Handling scalability, security, versioning, monitoring, and ensuring developer engagement.

Answer-25: API management is the process of creating, publishing, securing, monitoring, and maintaining APIs in a scalable and secure environment.

Answer-26: APIs enable interoperability, allow integration between different systems, and facilitate faster development through reusable services.

Answer-27: API gateway, developer portal, analytics, security, lifecycle management, and monetization.

Answer-28: An API gateway acts as a reverse proxy that routes client requests to backend services, enforces security policies, and handles traffic management.

Answer-29: Because APIs expose business logic and data, they must be protected from unauthorized access, data breaches, and attacks.

Answer-30: Authentication, authorization, rate limiting, encryption (TLS), and input validation.

Answer-31: Rate limiting restricts the number of API calls a client can make in a given time to prevent abuse and ensure fair usage.

Answer-32: Authentication verifies user identity, while authorization determines what resources or operations the user can access.

Answer-33: OAuth 2.0, API keys, JWT (JSON Web Tokens), and Basic Authentication.

Answer-34: It provides documentation, testing tools, and onboarding resources to help developers understand and consume APIs.

Answer-35: Clear documentation improves developer experience, reduces errors, and accelerates API adoption.

Answer-36: Versioning allows APIs to evolve without breaking existing clients by maintaining multiple API versions concurrently.

Answer-37: By using URI versioning (e.g., /v1/resource), query parameters, or headers to differentiate versions.

Answer-38: Monitoring provides insights into API usage, performance, and errors to ensure reliability and optimize resources.

Answer-39: Request volume, latency, error rates, throughput, and user activity.

Answer-40: Throttling limits the rate of API requests to protect backend services from overload.

Answer-41: By routing requests, caching responses, load balancing, and enforcing rate limits.

Answer-42: REST uses stateless HTTP and is more lightweight; SOAP is a protocol with stricter standards and supports more advanced messaging features.

Answer-43: Use consistent naming conventions, version your APIs, provide comprehensive documentation, and ensure statelessness.

Answer-44: It ensures that APIs are properly planned, developed, tested, deployed, maintained, and deprecated.

Answer-45: Apigee, AWS API Gateway, Azure API Management, Kong, and MuleSoft.

Answer-46: By using load balancing, caching, autoscaling infrastructure, and efficient API design.

Answer-47: Caching stores frequent API responses temporarily to reduce latency and backend load.

Answer-48: By validating and sanitizing input, using parameterized queries, and applying security best practices.

Answer-49: The process of generating revenue from APIs through subscription plans, pay-per-use, or tiered access.

Answer-50: Through authentication mechanisms, scopes, roles, and permissions.