[whakim]

REST APIs are extremely battle-tested, easy to integrated with, and far more mainstream than BigQuery public datasets or any other niche technology that may or may not exist at some point in the future. If cost is truly an issue, perhaps the solution is to properly fund the NPS so it can make smart technology decisions.

[tonymet]

every rest api implementation is bespoke. what does "battle tested" mean in this sense ?

Sure the concept of rest APIs is mature, the but each implementation is untested.

[tonymet]

at what cost?

[whakim]

I’m not sure if you’re serious (given the spammy nature of your posts, I’m inclined to believe not), but given that REST is the de facto standard for exchange of information between machines across the internet, I think the onus is on you to estimate how much money you think the NPS stands to save by doing it your way. Then the rest of us can evaluate whether that’s a good tradeoff.

[tonymet]

We only know based on the information we have that they are sharing CSV files via REST on AWS/EC2. That’s the most expensive way to share it, and also risky .

What’s spammy about my post? I have asked people to focus on costs when they make general statements like “all govt data should have a REST api”.

[whakim]

Do you actually know that the only source of the data is a static CSV? Or is that just speculation?

I think we can dispense with the risky argument, because this API has existed for years without issue.

When you make the argument that "X is too expensive," the onus is on you to prove it's expensive in a relative sense, not simply in an absolute sense. Saving $100 matters if you're spending $1000; it probably doesn't matter if you're spending $10m. Feel free to convince us: make some estimates, crunch some numbers, and look at existing NPS IT spending and see if they seem ballpark reasonable. Otherwise you're just banging on about a left-field solution that almost no one wants because it's putatively cheaper (but by how much, you can't say).

[tonymet]

all the APIs but one are static json

[tonymet]

CSV is also a de-facto standard and is more common than REST at 1/100 the cost

[warkdarrior]

Do you have numbers to backup the cost savings estimate? I can imagine lots of REST implementations that are really inexpensive.

[tonymet]

hosting csv on S3 vs hosting ec2 instances for an apache rest api