APIs are big news in IT circles, but what are they? Everybody talks about them in the modern sphere of software application development, but there seems to have been a lot of initial assumption that we all know what they are. Tell me you haven’t heard “Hey! We’re launching a new API!” -- great, what is it?
For the record then, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) establish a vital communications bond between different software program elements and data streams. APIs define the route for a programmer to code a program (or program component) that will be capable of requesting services from an operating system (OS) or other application.
APIs have the ability to 'speak' to and ‘glue’ together any required information components around a system. They are often ‘released’ to third-party programmers who will want to connect application elements and services together. APIs have a required syntax and are implemented by function calls composed of verbs and nouns -- simple, well mostly.
In more standard terms, APIs are really useful application connection and control points, so how do we manage them?
Logically onward to… API management
API management and integration is developing into a sphere all of its own and CA (Layer 7), MuleSoft, 3Scale and Apigee all line up among the usual suspects. Intel is also now firmly in the game after buying Mashery in Spring of 2013. Mashery’s modest employee base has received its Intel-branded t-shirts and bedded in by now, so what happens next? Industry comments have suggested that Intel with Mashery inside is ‘recognition’ by the firm that the central processing unit is no longer a silicon chip, but is in fact a gateway to a network.
The three pillars of API management
If we know what an API is (see above) and we know what management is (we'll take that as read), then how do you manage an API? As Mashery’s director of platform strategy Rob Zazueta explains, there are three pain points that well-designed API management systems aims to solve: security, scalability and support.
In terms of security -- exposing your data to the outside world is a scary prospect. A good API management solution acts as a guard dog controlling who has access to what data, when, where and how. But it should provide accessing standards such as OAuth that don’t get in the way of innovative development.
“When we think about APIs and scalability, success for an API can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you want developers to flock to your platform, but too many popular APIs have seen their backends fall down under the load. A solid API management solution allows for easy control over the amount of traffic that flows through to the backend – also known as throttling – while providing a layer of caching for the most common requests, reducing the number of calls to your datacenter,” said Mashery’s Zazueta.
That’s security and scalability, so what about support? Zazueta reminds us that developers are busy, so forcing them to dig through arcane manuals and bloated SDKs for answers will only drive them away. He suggests that it is better to let them serve themselves by requesting the access they need directly from a developer portal and granting them access automatically to a controlled set of data.
“A good API management system should have features like self-registration, interactive documentation and static documentation baked right in. Further, your API administration team should be able to see what calls are popular, which ones are resulting in errors and be able to trouble shoot the entire flow of data – from application to proxy to backend and back – without digging through protected logs. A good API management system provides the reporting and access necessary for those administrators to do their jobs with ease,” said Mashery’s Zazueta.
Will Intel change the API world for IoT?
Mashery is generally platform agnostic. The product can do protocol translation to whatever will work for developers consuming the API. Typically API output is done according to a standard framework such as REST or SOAP. Intel suggests that its work with Mashery may drive new connectivity in the rapidly fragmenting Internet of Things space.
In basic terms, APIs are really useful application connection and control points, so how do we... [+]
This is because the business opportunity in the IoT is for enterprises to be able to make better business decisions by automating the collection of intelligence from sensor enabled machines (jet engines, turbines) and then communicate commands back to these connected machines for more efficient operations, lower operating cost and better customer experience.
Zazueta reminds us that, "The technology proposition of APIs is to structure and normalize (via HTTP and REST or a similar framework) this fragmented sensor data and deliver it real-time and at scale to wherever it needs to be (an ERP or CRM system, an app a partner or customer)."
Now as even comparatively non-technical users start to gain awareness of these things called APIs (remember when people didn’t know what an “app” was?), we have an opportunity as businesspeople to gain some understanding of why they matter. Your business depends on the Internet, it depends on software and applications -- and it depends on connectivity. Why on Earth wouldn’t even the most tech-phobic C-level exec want a passing knowledge of what APIs are?
Ensuring API availability within the constraints of business policies as we construct new data services from multiple types of disparate data is important. Being able to report and analyze on all that activity is even more important. Give APIs a chance.
