Managing APIs Is an Increasingly Complex Burden

As the internet and availability of data has disrupted many industries, one career field that cont

Cloud Elements study analyzes data on enterprise API use and concludes that API use is growing rapidly, but it also takes careful management.

In the new, digital economy, future business applications will consist, not of monolithic sequences of business logic, but of multiple services activated through API connections. One application may connect to Salesforce, another to Google Maps or Google Translate.

APIs are carefully programmed interfaces or gateways that allow one application to talk to another, based on a set of conventions and standards. Public facing APIs can interact with consumers and many types of queries; APIs may also be engineered in a standard way to work only with authorized users.

But there’s no guarantee that one API-based service will work with another, due to normal incompatibilities between APIs. One mobile app may want data in one form, another in a different format. Handing off between outside services embedded in the same application can have similar problems. Developers strive to eliminate these difficulties as they put together their apps, but devices change, interfaces change, and APIs themselves are often modified without advance notice.

“Serverless” computing adds further demand. Serverless is where a standard API connects an application to the Lambda Service on Amazon Web Services and a software event trigger results in a function being run.

Some developers are turning to online API integration platforms, such as that hosted by the open source integration firm, MuleSoft. Cloud Elements also produces its Anypoint Platform, which provides a set of uniform APIs for connecting to various cloud services, such as a CRM API to connect to an Oracle, Salesforce or SugarCRM service.

Want to see why API management is important to the future of IT? See Why APIs Are Worth The Time And Attention of IT Professionals.

To get a picture of the current API economy, Cloud Elements has produced a report, The State of API Integration 2017, based on API use data collected from the technology tracking firm, Datanyze, and the ProgrammableWeb, an online source of API news and information. The ProgrammableWeb is owned by Mulesoft, which became a public company on the New York Stock Exchange on March 17.

The data was analyzed by Kin Lane, an independent API evangelist, contributor to the ProgrammableWeb, former API evangelist for CityGrid, and author of apievangelist.com, apivoice.com, and kinlane.com. The co-author was Ross Garrett, senior director of product marketing at Cloud Elements. The latter part of the report is specifically aimed at developers and names the integrations and features they need to design for, and isn’t covered in this article. The focus here is on the first part, which draws a picture of the state of API use.

First a fact noted by the introduction of the report: Use of public APIs grew by 326% between 2010 and 2013, according to ProgrammableWeb. That means enterprise applications, mobile applications used by consumers and business partners, among others, were linked to outside users or services through a public-facing application programming interface. That rate of growth is believed to have accelerated since then.