Hello everyone, a very good morning and evening to all of you, wherever you are seeing this from. I am Aditya Thatte; most of my time is spent architecting solutions around
Infrastructure clouds and digital transformation projects. I hope you have enjoyed the highly insightful talks on curated data and api design in our webinar series from our experts. Today I’m going to be talking about the use of API management in enabling Digital Transformation.
Here are the topics we would be looking at today.
Starting off with why APIs are critical and how APIs have evolved over the last few years.
We shall then take a look at what API management is, and why it is essential to enabling transformation.
We’d round off by discussing some myths around API mgmt, deployment models, evaluation criteria and case studies
I just want to take a step back in time and talk about Amazon’s secret sauce. It was indeed a fiery one. This is what Jeff Bezos mandated back in 2002.
Great ideas need to be heard, seen, felt and consumed. 1 minute
Web API development has made great leaps since the mid 2000s. The API pioneers in those days were Amazon, eBay & Salesforce.com
APIs have now come of age with the advent of cloud computing and the ubiquity of mobile devices.
Data explosion has and will create many new opportunities to optimize and scale processes, drive revenue.
Mobile devices have changed the way consumers behave and have set high benchmarks in terms of expectations. (retail, fitness, wellness)
(3 minutes) API Management as the name suggests, is the ability to manage APIs. Lets take a look at what that means, and why it is essential in the context of Digital Transformation.
The API management platforms offload many management features of the backend services such as security, caching and the like. The API proxies act as managed facades for backend services.
Introduction of management capabilities for APIs without having to touch the backend implementation of the service.
The goal of the API tier is to be able to connect to different devices in a shared, performance, and secure manner.
Lets now come to the meat of the talk. API Management components. API Management vendors package these components in the way they like; however a standard API management suite would comprise these 3 subsystems.
(1 minute) This itself is another 15 min webinar topic, however I’d like to quickly summarize some key evaluation pointers for you to be able to choose the right vendor for implementing your api management solution.
Identifying and creating your high level API strategy. This would define the following:
Aligning metrics (No. of downloads, X no. of API calls / day)
Knowing your audience (B2B, B2C)
Internal APIs
Partner APIs
Open APIs
Product APIs
GTM strategy (integration in another app, standalone app)
Evaluation Criteria
Hosting Model (On-premise vs cloud)
Monetization support
This piece of discussion is very much analogous to the discussion between choosing a public cloud v/s a private cloud.
