Building API-based and sophisticated microservices are going more and more mainstream these days. As a consequence of addressing the full lifecycle of APIs, this topic was requiring some expert knowledge from developers. API Management vendors like CA, IBM, Axway have understood this pain for a while and added capabilities to their offerings – e.g. Axway API Builder – in order to support non-tech people to rapidly create and run APIs. The most recent one is Tibco Mashery, acquiring nanoscale.io
According to Tibco’s press release, “Nanoscale.io tooling accelerates development and provides the fastest way to build microservices and assemble them into APIs. Once created, the microservices can then be quickly deployed to almost any environment, including on-premises, mobile, in the cloud, or even on an IoT edge device, delivering enhanced agility and speed.”
Microservices and APIs
But it does not stop with just building APIs. Once these APIs are designed, they need to be integrated and backed by data sources which can be either existing systems – that need to be plugged to the API via data connectors to transform the data e.g. MySQL, OData, SOAP – or new data sources which often are based on NoSQL databases or SaaS applications. Further support is provided by caching the queries to those sources to help with not overloading the backends, as they are usually not designed for the newly added volume of calls that might appear.
On top of building APIs, you need the necessary feature set to proxy APIs, secure APIs and monitor API calls that are made but also helping with promoting them to a larger audience through an API Portal. Adding such additional capabilities is essential to provide a holistic and complete solution.
Mobile projects require APIs at an early stage and usually can start with a standard set of APIs like location-based services, users, social, geo-location, photos, media. In addition to that, push notifications are also important. These APIs and Services are usually bundled and provided out of the box via MBaaS Services on such Platforms.
It’s very likely API Management and API Building tools are going to even further merge together into API Platforms, part of larger digital platforms, to lower the bar for people in business departments to start with APIs creating their own services and APIs.
Learn more about the different types of APIs here.