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This is an article from DZone's 2022 Enterprise Application Integration Trend Report.
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The equivalent of a Little League Australian rules football match involves a dozen or more groups of 7- to 10-year-olds playing on the field at halftime. Bubbling over with enthusiasm and energy, they quickly put up temporary posts and get going with firm but gentle supervision by the volunteer referees.
APIs are the connective tissue of scalable websites — fundamental to functioning in today’s digital world. But much like the physical world, weaknesses in connections and associated protocols can result in significant, sometimes existential, trouble.
A recent instance includes data leaks that stemmed from the misconfiguration of Microsoft Power Apps portals to enable public access. When examining this case, UpGuard found that the type of data varied between portals, and even included personal information that was used for COVID-19 contact tracing and COVID-19 vaccination appointments — as well as Social Security numbers, employee IDs, and millions of email addresses and names.
API monetization is a great way to recoup your investment in your API programs. Without direct monetization, you’re dependent on other sources of capital to grow the program, such as other profit centers or venture capital.
If you’re not directly monetizing your APIs, you could be leaving money on the table. This can be especially true if you don’t have any limits in place and lean on the honor system.
One of the core things I've been working on for the past 10 years is APIs — everything from simple APIs that are used by one client to multi-device and multi-purpose APIs. During those years, I've also had the opportunity to work with many third-party APIs like Stripe, Twilio, and others who are less popular and glamorous. Almost all of those APIs were REST-based and unique in some way.
There are many reasons why REST is so popular. It's simple to understand, it's flexible, it works on any scale, it has a great community and tools built around it. But besides those, I'd also say that a lot of popularity came from the fact that's its oldest rival, SOAP, is just horrible.
Developing and designing new MUnit test cases for the same integration flow is an additional effort for the development and delivery team if any changes in the same integration flow come in the existing flows regarding request and response structures. To reduce such a repetitive approach in MuleSoft integrations, a configuration- and parameterized-based approach is introduced in the development.
This blog will help you reproduce downstream API behaviors w.r.t. HTTP error codes using MUnit without real-time integration with the process or system APIs. Developers or architects will not be required to design or develop a new MUnit flow if a new error code is added in future enhancement inflow.
API Observability is a key component to properly execute APIOps Cycles and ensure your building something of value for your API users. If you’re not familiar with APIOps Cycles, take a look at this guide which provides an agile framework to quickly build APIs that are business-oriented and serve customer needs. API Observability itself is an evolution of traditional monitoring and born out of control systems theory.
Traditional monitoring focuses on tracking known unknowns. This means you already know what to measure like Request Per Second or Errors Per Second. While the metric value may be unknown beforehand, you already know what to measure or probe such as a counter to track requests into buckets. This makes it possible to report on the health of a system (like Red, Yellow, Green), but is a bad tool for troubleshooting engineering or business issues which usually require asking arbitrary questions.
API Monetization is on everybody’s mind: How can I make money with APIs? How can I justify my investments in API-related activities?
But all too often, direct monetization (i.e., charging for API access) is what people think about when they think about monetization. In the vast majority of cases, however, this monetization model is not a good choice. Instead, think of APIs as something to improve the value that you’re generating with your business.
In a world where even services are becoming micro, I thought of writing a micro story.
The trigger point of this article is the unquestionable dominant usage of JSON. You are looked upon with suspicion if you try proposing to even evaluate an alternate. I have been amazed by the faith in JSON we have put in many architectural solutions.
"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." - W. Edwards Deming
Over the past four years the annual State of API Integration report has become a resource for integration professionals to track trends, like the rise of GraphQL, and for product leaders to track key needs and drivers around APIs and integration. But that resource needs your input: please share your perspective in the 5th annual survey.
APIs — the current “big thing” — offer the opportunity for modern organizations to unlock new and lucrative business models. The article below covers some tips on how to spin the API flywheel and leverage its possibilities.
In the API economy, a successful service can gain popularity and be utilized in ways unpredicted and often inconceivable by its original owners. The very flexible nature of the technology opens many doors, including business collaborations, reuse in third-party products, or even conquering hardware barriers by reaching a spectrum of devices.
As more companies realize the benefits of an API-first mindset and treating their APIs as products, there is a growing need for good API product management practices to make a company’s API strategy a reality. However, API product management is a relatively new field with little established knowledge on what is API product management and what a PM should be doing to ensure their API platform is successful.
Many of the current practices of API product management have carried over from other products and platforms like web and mobile, but API products have their own unique set of challenges due to the way they are marketed and used by customers. While it would be rare for a consumer mobile app to have detailed developer docs and a developer relations team, you’ll find these items common among API product-focused companies. A second unique challenge is that APIs are very developer-centric and many times API PMs are engineers themselves. Yet, this can cause an API or developer program to lose empathy for what their customers actually want if good processes are not in place. Just because you’re an engineer, don’t assume your customers will want the same features and use cases that you want.
Each developer relations program has a different opinion on what should be north star metrics to measure the success of their platform. Some metrics are valid while others can be what are called vanity metrics. This post discusses which metrics you should or should not be tracking.
The goal of developer relations is to ensure third-party developers are able to leverage your platform to create something of value. Value can be subjective, but some examples include shipping a new integration or plugin that increases the usability of your products or integrating your APIs and SDKs into their web or mobile apps to deliver a better experience for their customers.
Purchasing a new enterprise analytics solution can be a great experience if you’ve never purchased software before, yet it can be a daunting task. There can be a variety of analytics vendors with overlapping features for a use case yet each has its strengths and weaknesses. As an alternative to purchasing ready-made SaaS, you can also build your own in-house API analytics infrastructure on top of open-source software like Spark, Druid, and Elasticsearch. This article digs into when it makes sense to build vs buy ready-made analytics solution and provide a point-based framework for evaluating API analytics solutions and perform the proper diligence.
The first decision a company should make is whether they want to build the infrastructure or purchase a ready-made solution. There are benefits and risks to both. In general, purchasing shortens the delivery of a well-polished analytics solution with lower cost in time and money compared to homegrown, but a homegrown gives you greater control over what is tracked and presented.
There are few metrics more critical than retention for a platform business. If you’re acquiring customers for $25, but they stop using your API after a month, then you have a leaky boat. Don’t spend more money on developer acquisition until retention is fixed. This requires accurate measurement of API retention.
If you came from a web or mobile product background, you may already be familiar with mobile retention to measure how many acquired users keep using a mobile app. Growing a B2B platform requires tracking similar KPIs to measure the success of your acquisition and product strategies. This article will dig into the best practices for tracking and increasing API retention.
Each developer relations program has a different opinion on what should be north star metrics to measure the success of their platform. Some metrics are valid while others can be what are called vanity metrics. This post discusses which metrics you should or should not be tracking.
The goal of developer relations is to ensure third-party developers are able to leverage your platform to create something of value. Value can be subjective but some examples include shipping a new integration or plugin that increases the usability of your products or integrating your APIs and SDKs into their web or mobile apps to deliver a better experience for their customers.
You may also like: Analyzing API Call Performance From Different Global Locations Based on cURL Metrics
What are your New Year's Resolutions?
The New Year brings with it a multitude of good intentions, with many of us determined to improve our lives one way or another and to set aspirational goals so that we can better our current self. With the idea of New Year resolutions, this post is about some New Year’s resolutions that all API Product Managers should consider adopting to better their API product offering.
While understanding the importance of the APIF, we also recognize that good architectural practices and proper logical architecture of the application/services could be even more important than the service mesh. To support the integration strategy, CIBC has been developed Integration Pattern, which makes internal and external APIs the emerging standard for integration across the bank and beyond. This pattern transitions from existing legacy integration components and patterns to modern equivalents that embrace APIs and (micro)services by truly distributing all gateway and isolation layer functions.
The CIBC Integration Pattern is presented in the following diagram: