Comment by asar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asar | Hacker News Reader

I really like the product and the direction this is going! Especially for things like Authentication, DB, PubSub the value proposition, compared to tying a bunch of 3rd party services together or reading a lot of AWS docs (both options will be much more expensive), seems great. So I will definitely try out your service!

I do have some question for a bunch of the other APIs, and maybe this points to an issue I'm having in general with the service right now, it's missing transparency in the specs.

- Are things hosted on some other cloud provider, if so where? What region?

- What about uptime? If I end up building an application with all of these APIs, I do need a bit more confidence that things will be stable.

Some more specific questions

- the crypto endpoint looks interesting, but for me, it would be quite crucial to know where the data is from? How often is it updated?

- For the "Google" endpoint, I'm missing the option to select mobile or desktop results, and also what's the default region? Is this done via a headless chrome instance running somewhere, or just curling results? Do I have to worry that your IPs will be blacklisted by Google if there are too many queries?

- And a random idea for the "Comments" API it would be great to combine it with the "Spam" endpoint that's available for emails.

Really excited to see where this is going though! And I'm definitely going to follow you guys for new features and API additions, joined the discord a while ago, actually.

Thanks for the comments and questions. I'll do my best to answer them.

> Are things hosted on some other cloud provider, if so where? What region?

Our core platform is currently hosted on DigitalOcean in the London region. That will expand to multiple regions and multiple providers over time. We did start that way many years ago but with a small team it's hard to manage.

> What about uptime? If I end up building an application with all of these APIs, I do need a bit more confidence that things will be stable.

We want to be able to provide uptime guarantees in the near future. Right now I'll say based on our experience running it in the past 9-12 months it's feeling like four 9s verging on 5 but I don't want to jinx us. We are dependent on our providers but we're also people who have managed platforms for many years.

> the crypto endpoint looks interesting, but for me, it would be quite crucial to know where the data is from? How often is it updated?

Our crypto APIs are currently powered Finage.co.uk. We do some level of caching on our side but only for 5-10 mins. I'll try add some details around that in the overview. You can see the source at https://github.com/micro/services

> For the "Google" endpoint, I'm missing the option to select mobile or desktop results, and also what's the default region? Is this done via a headless chrome instance running somewhere, or just curling results? Do I have to worry that your IPs will be blacklisted by Google if there are too many queries?

This is using Google's custom JSON query API. It's pretty limited but we also started with a very simple usecase. You're the first to ask for anything more advanced and that's how we'd look into it. So happy to dig in more and see if we can work on it.

> And a random idea for the "Comments" API it would be great to combine it with the "Spam" endpoint that's available for emails.

Thanks will look into it!

> Our crypto APIs are currently powered Finage.co.uk. We do some level of caching on our side but only for 5-10 mins.

This seems very much at odds with the description of "up to the second cryptocurrency prices, quotes, previous close information, and news."

I wouldn't want to act on stale information, especially when the timestamp is truncated so much.

    crypto/handler/crypto.go:172: 
    rsp.Date = time.Unix(0, int64(res.Timestamp)*int64(time.Millisecond)).UTC().Format("2006-01-02")

I understand the need for caching, of course.

I think you'll find most providers are doing some form of caching but I understand your point. We shouldn't miss sell it. Thanks for the feedback. I'd like to try provide up to the second relevant data but it would have to come from an exchange like binance or something else.

What about utilizing your own pubsub to enable a websocket subscription to price pushes? You could still cache historic, folks can subscribe to events, charged for receipt? I don’t know how you have your backends but I wrote a trading platform once and this was how we did it. Don’t become a trading platform. Just provide a way to get the true latest quote if someone needs it.

Very interesting idea. I think a lot of people are asking for pubsub/events/websockets for updates on a number of APIs so if we can offer some sort of general abstraction to get events for any API that would be useful.

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