The following will illustrate the importance of API management and how it can be implemented in the future in the form of a few key words.

1. Lifecycle management

  • Deeper integration of all tools throughout the API lifecycle will further speed up the lifecycle cycle and, more importantly, provide aN API that meets consumer needs. This is closely related to process improvements in the API lifecycle, and we are seeing this more and more across products as more enterprises begin to view apis as products where product managers guide the lifecycle.

  • Apis are at the heart of our ability to build software faster, using microservices and a driven CI /CD environment to communicate with Kubernetes (K8s). This will become even more important as companies adopt a serverless architecture, executing more code and business logic through API calls. The main question facing enterprises of all sizes is: How do you manage the entire lifecycle of an API in a way that doesn’t sacrifice performance and cost? Otherwise, businesses will only see their costs increase proportionately with the success of their new digital business products, to the detriment of long-term sustainability.

  • Distributed API management is the essence of large-scale distributed modern application development. API management must be distributed. Allows centralized control of services using a single pane, with all reports showing who has access to what, which services are available, and where those services are automated. Anything that is inconsistent with the application itself will be out of sync with your centralized management at some point. With localized control and distributed execution, each service reports to the service center. When someone tries to access a service, it can hit the central authentication server to determine whether that person should have access.

2. Application integration

  • Our main focus is on using apis to integrate across applications and business partners. IT systems are networked within the enterprise by replacing older systems with SaaS applications that need to be integrated with other enterprise systems, both Internet and traditional. For example, you often work with customers who implement ERP systematization, which requires the integration of the new ERP with other systems. Having one more legacy system can lead to messy file-based integration.

  • Using a new ERP or published API management system is the preferred integration point for connecting all other enterprise systems, such as general ledger and warehouse management solutions. In addition, these systematic ERP solutions provide real-time access to enterprise information through their apis.

  • The ability to work with customers to provide limited access to this information by publishing apis to their partners. For example, partners who want to check inventory or check order status can use APIS to provide views of their data directly from ERP, which can enhance traditional EDI processes through API queries to query for certain behaviors that benefit from real-time responses.

3. The micro service

  • Everyone talks about the API lifecycle at one time or another these days, but a lot of times you just provide tools for each development phase, rather than an integrated approach that makes it easier for developers to design, implement, deploy, and manage it in an automated manner. It’s an inefficient process to design documents and wait months to see if the API meets the design requirements. A developer would prefer iterations to facilitate and support an agile development process. We’ll eventually go down the path of DevOps for automated apis, even if we’re not there yet.

  • With the emergence of a variety of formal factor control point types in the future. It is important to consider how service networks and API management, which is about providing a service in relation to multiple consumers of that service, will stack up. The larger the scale, the more important a formal API management platform becomes. EOLINKER API Studio can be used for domestic words, Swagger\Postman and so on.

  • When apis are used instead of shared libraries to control API access for individual users or teams of developers, the service network is well protected for communication between the two endpoints. The service Grid provides an intelligent network to help developers connect to other services in the grid. Developers will in turn help solve this problem by learning how to create distributed applications that work on containers, microservice environments, and service networks.

  • Application modernization based on microservices architecture is central to the digital transformation plan. The biggest opportunity lies in API management of microservices. For managing the apis used by microservices, a “small footprint” solution is needed that is flexible, portable, and can run on any infrastructure (bare metal, VM and container, public cloud and private cloud).

  • We can expect to see a huge trend in service networks over the next year or two as more enterprises adopt API management and bring each microservice to ensure that applications and microservices are able to communicate with each other. Instead, the API gateway also puts the proxy on the edge to trick the microservice into communicating only with the proxy.

  • The market is ready for SaaS solutions that offer microservice apis directly to customers with licensing and API delivery options. For example, Amazon builds each component of AWS as a microservice directly addressable by customers, and can write custom authorizers that receive OAuth hosted tokens and convert these authorizers into access decisions based on IAM policies. This is actually quite simple, although it requires a lot of configuration and customization by AWS customers. When demand is high enough, we will one day see Amazon offering standards-based, resource-aware API authentication and authorization products as first-class named products, rather than business processes hidden in tutorials.

4.API other technologies

  • As more tools for API management emerge on the market, they will become more integrated and represent the maturity of the industry. Using the right set of API tools to do a particular job and do it well is undoubtedly the most efficient, and also provides space for developers to focus on their core projects and delegate redundant work to already well-established services to ensure quality and efficiency.

  • As long as the “smaller, more efficient, multilingual support” is followed, communication modes can be used in a variety of styles both internally and externally. GRPC, for example, is a binary format developed by Google that is a more efficient way to communicate internally. But externally, there is still a need for something as user-friendly as REST, so there is more use of GRPC and apis internally for convenience. We’ll see apis rendered in a variety of formats, one internal and one external.

  • In the short term, HTTP is likely to have a broader impact on the form of apis than it does now. Use cases that could not be implemented can now implement traditional communication patterns. In the long run, true data (possibly computing) fragmentation can seriously change the process. However, the tools to implement this concept are still in their infancy. The most advanced enabler today is the blockchain paradigm, seeing many companies exploring how blockchain can solve these problems, perhaps in the future all the problems have new solutions.

  • While the adoption rate of the OpenAPI specification (OAS 3.0) remains high compared to RESTful apis, some companies and technologies are adopting apis that go beyond SOAP/XML and WSDL/WADL based. New advances in technologies such as RESTful apis based on HTTP/JSON are being adopted and serve the industry well.

  • In addition, non-HTTP-based apis are on the rise, making gRPC, asynchronous apis (messaging, streaming, publishing and subscribing) a focus for some companies. For example, the AsyncAPI specification was built to address non-HTTP based asynchronous apis such as MQTT, Kafka, WebSockets, AMQP, and STOMP protocols. This is where the RISE of API management vendors, tools to transform API specifications from one format to another, comes in.

  • Another opportunity for API management vendors is to extend products in API operations (APIOps). APIOps will be applied to the API in a similar way to DevOps applied to the software development life cycle. For example, GitLab offers a complete set of DevOps tools for the API lifecycle, from project planning and source code repositories to CI/CD monitoring, security, and issue tracking capabilities that can be provided to enterprises in one place. All of the above can be implemented behind the API management platform.

  • We need a better approach considering the cost or security issues that arise when the cost is not used to properly maintain the API. GraphQL, SPARQL, and data security co-existing with data offer an attractive future. It not only simplifies, but also provides additional utilities and puts data security at the top of the list of concerns. Blockchain can be used to protect data integrity, allowing consumers to prove the source of information.

  • In the future, most data will be generated, sent and received in real time. Given that the amount of data generated each day is growing at a tremendous rate, developers will soon need more cloud-native and scalable solutions to manage apis. Older API management solutions have been too slow and do not always scale horizontally.

5. Typical practices

  • API management tools can provide a set of products to help enterprises manage their API design workflow at scale. A key part of this is building on existing development workflows in most enterprises, which means integrating with existing tools like GitHub. To do this, good API management tools need to be able to integrate APIS, automatically extract information from GitHub into products, and push information from products to GitHub. The end result is a better experience for our customers, made possible by the rich apis that GitHub exposes. The basic problem that apis solve is to solve technical requirements in the shortest time and at the lowest cost. Better API management tools in the market include POSTMAN (English), EOLINKER (Chinese and English), Swagger (English) and so on.

  • Schiphol airport has launched a use case to improve the passenger experience through the airport. There’s too much data is valuable, it has become a integration problems, extend the boarding pass, flight tracking, arrive at the departure information, the pilot alert information such as integration, in order to realize the internal agility, they decided to focusing on the API, to achieve the integration of different applications, open the internal apis to build the partner ecosystem.

  • Capital One is One of the largest banking institutions in the world, offering a variety of online financial services, including API products. Third-party developers and partners can deliver first-class digital experiences to their customers and create new revenue streams by using Capital One’s external API to open bank accounts, generate personalized credit card offers, and track customer rewards. NGINX technology enables Capital One to scale its application to 12 billion operations per day, with a peak of 2 million operations per second, with a latency of just 10-30 milliseconds.

  • Another typical use case is Netflix, which needs to connect to over 500 client devices, iPhone, Android, X-Box, etc. But they have well-formalized apis for handling metadata in movies, handling search requests, image services, and the actual streaming of movies. But in constrained devices on tight networks, they create a middleware back end for the front end (BFF) to use the base API, contain most of the business logic that the client needs to use, and then open interfaces to their own APIS that serve only that client. When a new client appears, all they have to do is create a new BFF in the client code. If a device’s client is no longer needed, they simply close the code and do not break anything.

  • If you’re a marketer or a marketing technology company, they used to build software solutions in-house. The main problem, however, is that it takes a lot of time and money to get the data needed to build a marketable product. Marketing requires a lot of data to be effective, but the cost of collecting and analyzing all that data is very high, and because it is clear that not every company can allocate the resources needed to implement a software project, the technical barriers to entry are unreasonable. Now, using API technology, you can build a simple keyword research tool in a matter of weeks, greatly improving the efficiency of marketing.

References:

Dzone.com/articles/ap…

Dzone.com/articles/ap…