While speaking at conferences, and conducting workshops within enterprise groups, one of the questions we get asked frequently is always regarding what the future will hold. Companies have a lot of anxiety about the future and have fatigue regarding what technological trends they’ll have to be riding next and in general how to avoid the pitfalls around tech. The companies we are working with want to try and separate reality from fiction when it comes to understanding where things are going and be smarter about where they invest when it comes to the API efforts.
In the perpetual march forward we find a standards-based approach helps keep you anchored in reality and allow you to better resist some of the waves of tech that we all have to deal with. We see APIs as just the next evolution of the web, and by keeping an eye on where leading API providers are headed, while also considering the wider API landscape of standards and tooling, we feel pretty confident that we have our finger on the pulse of things. Allowing us to not get too caught up with trends that are influenced by vendors, or fueled by investment cycles, and better keep up with the realities of what is truly changing.
One area of evolution in the API space that we watch closely, have integrated into our roadmap, as well as working to keep our customers informed around, is focused on the migration towards and event-driven way of pushing your API infrastructure into the future. Ensuring that organizations are not just responding to API requests, and serving up the proper responses, but also mapping out the meaningful events that are occurring across the platform, and prioritizing the most important ones. This evolution in how we operate our API platforms isn’t rooted in the latest service or tooling, it is led by the API providers who are seeing the most activity on their platforms, and it is a response designed to make platforms more efficient, and cut through the noise that is occurring on a daily basis.
As we help our clients understand what the future holds, event-driven approaches to operating their platform is something we spend time educating them on. We help our clients understand the different services and tools that are emerging on the landscape to help satisfy the demand for more event-driven architecture, but first, we prefer helping them map out their APIs, and understand the event-driven opportunity that already exists on their own platforms–no new tooling is needed for this. Usually, just a small consulting engagement is required, with a potential workshop at the end–depending on how large of a group is involved. Helping everyone in seeing what is already there, and have a discussion about what is next when it comes to evolving API operations.
Blockchain, GraphQL, Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture and other technological trends are difficult to keep up with. We find you have to prioritize based on the demand that is already occurring via your platform, and not based what is being said in the tech blogosphere and on social media. We are guessing there is a lot of pressure to bring more efficiency to your operations by responding to meaningful events, and probably breaking down older systems into newer microservices, and that much of the pressure to tune into the Blockchain, and GraphQL are coming from outside forces. This should help you decide which areas you should be investing in as part of your API operations, however, if you need help sorting through it all, please let us know, we are happy to help.
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