APIs have come a long way from the arcane geek-speak of software interfaces popularized by Win32 APIs (still among the most commonly searched API phrases). Today, APIs represent interfaces between businesses and large swaths of internal enterprise services and business units. APIs not only connect software to software but also help to create entire commercial ecosystems, and so have become integral parts of how enterprises conduct business.
Good API design separates APIs that merely expose assets from those that help developers get things done. As I’ve written before, and as we’ll explore in this article, good design includes the style in which web API URLs are constructed.
Whether in the tech press or analyst reports, it became more common in 2018 to see the words “API” and “security”—or worse, “API” and “breach”—together in the same headline. APIs are not only the connective tissue between applications, systems, and data, but also the mechanisms that allow developers to leverage and reuse these digital assets for new purposes.
Apigee experts published over 50 editorials in 2018 — including dozens here in APIs and Digital Transformation — to help developers, IT architects, and business leaders understand how to maximize the value of APIs and keep pace with constant technological change.
2018 was an AMAZING year for Google Cloud’s Apigee team. It was, in fact, another “best year ever.” We’re deeply grateful to the companies who use Apigee to accelerate their businesses with APIs.
Good API design separates APIs that merely expose assets from those that help developers get things done. As I’ve written before, and as we’ll explore in this article, good design includes the style in which web API URLs are constructed.
The Soviet era left Mongolia with a legacy of manual banking processes that requires huge quantities of paperwork. This means that customers need to visit branches frequently for simple things like changing a PIN number or requesting a credit card. Since we count 2.8 million of Mongolia’s 3.3 million citizens as our customers, this could mean long lines at the bank, with an average wait time of 25 minutes for each visit. We wanted to change that.
As I work with customers around the world and across verticals, I’m struck by a common pattern: many savvy business people and technologists grasp the value of the new application programming interfaces (APIs) they’re creating for external ecosystem use cases, such as providing partners access to data or functionality, but they often see both the APIs they already have and those they build for internal use in a different light — not as software products that let developers
APIs are a key way businesses operate at the speed and scale necessary for today’s economy. We designed Apigee, Google Cloud’s full lifecycle API Management platform, to give businesses control over, and visibility into, the APIs that connect applications and data across the enterprise and across clouds. Apigee was recently recognized by Gartner as a leader in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Full Life Cycle API Management.
Are they basically just an evolved version of service-oriented architectures (SOA)? Since a microservice must be exposed via an application programming interface (API) for an organization to scale it to new developers, does that mean managing microservices is basically the same as managing APIs? As this article will discuss, the answer to both of these questions is a clear “no” — and companies looking to get the most from their microservices need to understand why.
