So, you want to autoscale your site. Now what?
A great and easy way to autoscale is to leverage another site’s API. What’s an API, you ask? An API, or application program interface, is, as defined by Wikipedia, a particular set of rules and specifications that a software program can follow to access and make use of the services and resources provided by another particular software program that implements that API. Okay, now let’s translate that into English. An API is a tool that big sites (e.g. Google, Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon) create to allow other sites (i.e. think your site) to easily access their data.
Here are some examples. Amazon and eBay affiliate sites all use APIs provided by Amazon and eBay. That’s how they are able to extract all the product info they need for their own spin-off sites. This is also how sites integrate Google Maps–by leveraging the Google Maps API.
Now, how does this help you autoscale?
An API is the doorway between your site and your site’s content. This means you essentially don’t need to create any data yourself, because all the data you need is already created for you. You just need to go through the API (i.e. the doorway) to get the data being requested by your site’s visitor. […]