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API Floods
A long, long time ago before streaming platforms were a thing, if you wanted to listen to a specific song, you had to wait patiently for the song to appear on the radio or buy the whole record. Sometimes you loved all the songs, sometimes you listened to that one song a couple of times and the rest of the album was just redundant. Then the digital transformation of the music industry happened and now any song is a couple of clicks away.
Similar situation has been happening within the enterprise solutions market – up until around 7 years ago, an enterprise IT stack relied on a couple of major systems that fulfilled every possible business needs you could think of. If no solution was available out-of-the-box you just made a new request to your development team to implement your wishes. After some time the systems became too bulky and hard to maintain or just too expensive and the enterprise entered into a new transformation phase where each system was replaced with an alternative system or an entirely new version of the same system. All functionality was evaluated – what was provided by the new system was used, and what was not was re-developed or if too hard/long/expensive – a new legacy system was born that most likely is haunting your IT stack up until this day. Then something happened. Cloud services got more and more available, new startups started to provide better, much cheaper and flexible solutions that often targeted specific needs and the word SaaS entered the mainstream.
Nowadays, instead of embarking on a 3 year transformation project you could add features to your enterprise systems instantly. All features could be added within 2-3 sprints, instead of 2-3 years. And the same goes for your infrastructure. Now you don’t need to build a huge data center to support your extensive processing needs once every quarter (i.e. if your local tax agency requires yearly tax declaration to be submitted digitally, it is not wise for them to build a huge infrastructure to support the huge traffic, instead it is cheaper and faster to rent out the processing power for the time (for example Amazon Web Services). All of this freedom and flexibility came with a cost. Every department of enterprise started to add features to their systems. Sometimes even more than 2 departments in same enterprise would enter in agreements for the same SaaS services because of lack of internal communication and due to the fact that often contracts are so cheap and specific, it slips through the procurement (plus the people in the procurement can’t be both negotiating the best deals for you and governing your whole enterprise IT stack).
To avoid this total mess, extensive costs, artificial blockers and speed reducers in your enterprise IT stack, you should evaluate proper API management platform that includes the following:
- API gateway capable of being connected using various protocols, internal/external sources and methods
- Microservices infrastructure availability
- Ease of coding advanced workflows and actions
- Possibility to define common process, development guidelines, naming conventions and related organizational matters
- Central access control, traffic control, access/traffic adjustment tools
- Simple and capable API lifecycle management
End goal is not to decrease capabilities of enterprise solutions by reducing API availability or flexibility, instead to normalize the usage, increase reuse of existing APIs and decrease time to onboard new APIs, including common standards. If APIs are publicly (within organizational bounds) available, you don’t need to spend as many resources investigating functionality that may be implemented quietly by other teams or negotiating on new APIs. Returning to the music topic – a good API platform is like a streaming app where you can simply play, sort, like or dislike any song without additional effort.
If you are interested in improving your enterprise landscape with one of the best API management platforms that market has to offer (Leader in 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Full Life Cycle API Management for the Fourth Consecutive Year) You should read more about Software AGs API gateway or just Give us a call and we will help you decide.