Geo-DNS change to api.ciscospark.com on April 29th 2022

[Jeff Marshall]

This has been posted to the API changelog multiple times, first being over a year ago on April 27th 2021, but posting here for additional visibility.

On April 29th 2022 around 6pm PST, we will be enabling Geo-DNS for api.ciscospark.com. This change was already made to webexapis.com several months ago.

Some API endpoints accept UUID formatted IDs, even though this was never documented. They are typically in a format like AAAA-AAAA-AAAA-AAAA and are not returned by the API itself (see exception below). We see most usage for roomIds and messageIds. The API uses base64 encoded IDs that are usually encoded as Y2lZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ and these identifiers carry routing information that help the API architecture find the correct cluster. As we are entering the next phase of Geo-DNS the UUID format will stop working. Today all requests using UUIDs are routed to the US cluster where many of them can be resolved. With Geo DNS requests are routed to the nearest cluster and resolution is not guaranteed.

Note: A notably exception are meeting instance IDs in NNNNN_I_NNNNNNN format. Those are returned by the API and are usable in the API.

[Jeff Marshall]

We've had some reports of issues after this change was implemented but they have all been related to websockets and using one of the community built/maintained SDKs, like the ones listed on https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/awesome-webex. The officially supported SDK that supports websockets is the JS/Browser SDK and it has a UUID utility that will properly encode the UUID returned by websockets before attempting to send requests to api.ciscospark.com. This same type of utility would need to be implemented into any community maintained SDKs.