Preface

If you you are Rust a developer, have a basic knowledge of the language and want to expand your knowledge to build resilient REST API services, this book is for you. Even if you have experience with API development, you may find useful ideas here. The book can be valuable for experienced API developers too, who consider switching to Rust from other languages.

You need to have a basic knowledge of the Rust language, the compiler, the crate ecosystem. Read the official Rust book if you have not read it yet! You do not have to be familiar with async programming, we will explain that shortly.

You will learn the basics of REST APIs, followed by the ecosystem and usual system architecture around a typical REST API. We will explain how to make your API secure, scalable and observable, so you can move it to production confidently. We will also show you how to implement automated testing, continuous integration and delivery. We will provide examples for cloud deployment scenarios too.

We try to give you a solid theoretical foundation first, explaining what makes a good API and what makes it resilient. Then show you how to achieve those goals step-by-step, fulfilling one requirement at a time.

Readers will learn how to build a simple asynchronous REST API server based on axum and tokio.rs. Then we will add persistence to SQL and NoSQL databases, JWT and OAuth authentication, authorization, tracing to log files or through OpenTelemetry, collecting metrics, implementing caching, request throttling.

By the end of the book you will be able to build solid, well designed REST API services and deploy it on your own to cloud providers.