This is part of a 3-part series on APIs, sustainability, and climate change. Check out part 1 on managing a greener API lifecycle, and part 2 on ways to embed and innovate on top of third-party APIs to make greener products. In this final part, we will look at the environmental impact of common architecture trends and recommend steps to take to minimize the impact of each.
While the year 2021 was a huge success, we've re-energized ourselves for 2022. By launching new cloud platforms, we began our path to radically simplify the production of digital experiences for our clients. This allows us to offer products and solutions as software as a service (SaaS), private cloud, or on-premises, with the ability to seamlessly move between the three alternatives in the future.
Recently, I was fortunate to have an insightful conversation with Matt Klein, Lyft software engineer and creator of Envoy, the popular open-source edge and service proxy for cloud-native applications. Envoy was the third project to graduate from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), following Kubernetes and Prometheus. Before Lyft, Matt held positions at Microsoft, Amazon and Twitter, and served on the oversight committee and board of the CNCF.
Go, often referred to as Golang, is a popular programming language built by Google. Its design and structure help you write efficient, reliable, and high-performing programs. Often used for web servers and rest APIs, Go offers the same performance as other low-level languages like C++ while also making sure the language itself is easy to understand with a good development experience.
A good business model is one that can easily generate revenue. Often, when developers build something it could easily be packaged and used by another organization. This is extremely true when it comes to APIs. If an API is solving a well-known problem, there is likely a market for it. Being able to expose an API for public consumption can be done in many ways, a popular option being using an API gateway. The real hurdle comes when you decide to start billing for usage.
Customer identity and access management (CIAM) has become indispensable for organizations. According to an article by the Business Research Company, the CIAM market is expected to reach $45.56 billion in 2025, at a compound annual growth rate of 18.6%. The research firm adds that the increasing use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices — such as smartphones, smartwatches, smart homes and medical sensors — will be the primary driving factor for this growth.
AWS Lambda has been around for a few years now, and it remains the most popular way to experiment with serverless technology. If you're not familiar with serverless, it's a model of development in which managing, provisioning, and scaling servers is abstracted away from application development. Servers do exist in a serverless world, but they are completely managed by the cloud provider, allowing developers to focus on packaging their code for deployment.