For many organizations, the days of undocumented APIs are mostly gone. There are now several formats used to describe APIs. These machine-readable files can be converted into documentation and even be used to test integrations. While there are several formats, the most well-known is OpenAPI. In this article, we’ll provide a highlight of that and […]
API Strategy
Kafka Integration with API Management
Kafka messaging busses are becoming more prevalent in today’s enterprises. In this video, I briefly discuss why, and then demonstrate integration with an API management solution (using Layer7 as the example – if you use a different API management solution, this will likely have differences).
API Metrics: How to Measure Your Impact
Along with the business strategy comes the measurements you’ll use to determine success. In this post, we’ll consider three common categories of API metrics: Raw API Usage: Data on calls and users Business Value: An API’s value to your bottom line Innovation and Partnership: Value to longer term business goals Ideally these three areas of […]
Developers Aren’t the Users of Your API
Hang around the API community long enough and you’ll hear about design, developer experience, and ways to appeal to someone integrating with your programming interface. That may lead you to think of developers as the users of your API. While an important audience, developers are a conduit for the actual end users of the software […]
NA API Academy Virtual Workshop 2020 Replay
Here’s the replay of the North America API Academy Virtual Workshop from July 15, 2020. The agenda was the keynote on API strategy with John Cocke of HCL, followed by a discussion on API design with Academy members Jaime Ryan and Aran White. Jay Thorne of the Academy then discussed microservices and service mesh, and […]
How-to: View Rich Analytics for GraphQL APIs and Back-ends Using Euclid
After you publish your API, one of the first questions you may be asked or ask yourself is probably “who is using it?”, followed quickly by “is it working?”. Over time you’ll want to see all sorts of data about your API traffic. In the past, you may have spent months updating your endpoints to […]
Two Questions Behind Your API Strategy
Over the last 10 years, APIs have become the de facto tool of modern software development. “Let’s build an API for that,” is a natural reaction to a technical problem. While APIs play a key role, many engineering organizations are now overflowing with non-strategic services. Developer confusion might have been limited if those groups had […]
TL;DR: Abstractions Make Us Both More Productive and Less Certain
Today, I have a guest contributor: I was working with Vidhya Bhushan, one of my Broadcom team members on our performance testing team. We had a discussion about performance testing for a specific use case and I asked for scaling of the test generation, and he commented that we might not need to since the […]
TL;DR: High Cohesion, High Consistency, but with Low (or No) Coupling
This came up in a CI/CD pipeline discussion with Aman Khurana at our customer FedEx a few weeks ago, and the more I think about it, the more I like the phrase. I’m going to call it “CCLC” for short. In my view, this is a great summary of the important goals of a modern […]
You Bet That APIs Power DevOps Tools
Which came first, APIs or DevOps? Though the two are complementary, the answer here is clear. There are major benefits of DevOps in your API lifecycle, but APIs are likely responsible for the growth in DevOps methodologies. The Cloud, modern code reviews, and continuous integration all depend on APIs. APIs Cause Cloud Formations Plenty has […]