How to Avoid this Type of Technical Debt: Your Unmanaged 3rd Party APIs

Integrating third-party APIs is essential for modern businesses but can lead to significant technical debt if not managed properly. The integration process often overlooks the need for ongoing maintenance, leading to recurring issues like caching, rate limits, and unexpected behavior that burden engineering teams. Problems such as downtime, token management, and API breaking changes exacerbate this debt, impacting system reliability and increasing costs. To mitigate these challenges, organizations should adopt long-term solutions, catalog APIs, decouple API maintenance from application code, simulate fixes pre-production, and establish resilience policies. Such strategies not only improve API performance and productivity but also prevent the accumulation of technical debt. Lunar offers solutions to help manage these complexities, advocating for proactive API management and optimization.