In today’s tech landscape, APIs are a hot topic. The rise of microservice-based architectures as opposed to legacy monoliths has further driven the necessity of robust APIs. With microservices, powerful applications are broken up – i.e. distributed as discrete components across numerous logical and physical machines. This is possible in part due to the availability of cloud computing – virtualized access to almost limitless compute and storage resources made available in a pay-as-you-go model, provided by large technology companies operating massive data centers around the globe.
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These microservices-based architectures are a contrast to the large-scale, tightly coupled applications of the past that were better designed to run on the limited infrastructure available at the time. When applications required more resources, they would need to scale vertically (i.e. adding more memory, CPU, or storage to the machine). The ubiquity of computing resources in the cloud allows modern applications to instead scale horizontally, by distributing the load over many less powerful machines. Further, applications can be designed intelligently – with components running on infrastructure that better meets the unique load. This ultimately leads to bite-sized chunks of the larger application having infrastructure which is uncoupled from the rest.