A drawback to the Twitter API is its incompatibility with the cloud.
The API looks for one IP address when making a call. A rate limit is imposed so a busy Twitter app may be difficult to access during heavy load times. But the cloud is not one IP address. It’s a network of thousands of IP adresses that are randomly called to a cloud environment.
Apigee and Heroku are launching a service today that will serve to alleviate the rate limit problem for Ruby on Rails developers. According to Sam Ramji of Sonoa Systems, Heroku developers will now have access to Apigee’s carrier grade Twitter gateway. The gateway means that developers get quick access to Twitter with minimal latency issues. Apigee is a service provided by Sonoa Systems.
Ramji said Sonoa launched the carrier grade gateway to Amazon EC2 at Chirp, the Twitter developer conference. The service has helped Apigee see a five time increase in its service.
Heroku’s Oren Teich says both Apigee and Sonoa are in the same Amazon region, meaning they can minimize latency issues.
Ramji says Sonoa is the first to have a relationship with Twitter that allows for this kind of gateway.
On the flip side, we are curious about the level of control this provides Apigee and Heroku. And it points the issues that Twitter has historically faced in its relationships with developers. Both Ramji and Teich say their number one priority is openness. They say they are not making the developers life any different.
But it also points the thriving developer ecosystem that is fostering the demand for this kind of service that combines two services to get better access to the cloud.
