Advantages

Listed below are several advantages to using Cisco Spaces - Partner Firehose API to get data into your application:

  • The API is designed from ground up for cloud scale.

  • A single channel supports multiple different types of events. Your application can specify the types of events you are interested in.

  • The API has very low latency and can be used to support real-time use cases.

  • A single channel carries information for all the customers that are sharing data with your application. There is no need to set up and manage separate connections for each customer.

  • The API supports sending both JSON data and Protocol Buffers (protobuf) objects.

    • JSON is easy to work with, and can be directly consumed by most platforms today.

    • Protocol Buffers (developed and open sourced by Google Inc.) is language neutral, binary format that optimizes the bandwidth used and allows faster processing.

  • Firehose API push channels are easy to set up and running if you are already on Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. Just provide credentials and end-point details and start receiving data immediately.

  • Firehose API pull channels are designed for easy implementation in your application, and has several advantages over a Webhook type integration.

  • It is designed to handle high volume of events efficiently. Events are carried over a single pool of persistent connections significantly reducing connection overheads.

  • Pull channels allow resuming after a short period without any loss of data. This is particularly useful to system upgrades and short outages without loss of data.

  • The number of connections can be optimized based on the volume of events being received.

  • It also supports HTTP/2. HTTP/2 has lower overheads than HTTP x

  • It supports production, sandbox, and staging authentication tokens. This allows you to test and verify the next update to your application without disrupting data flowing to your production instance.