Innovation &Transformation

Develop a strategy for digital transformation

Leading companies closely tie their digital and corporate strategies together.3

Six Ways to Scale Enterprise-Level APIs and Microservices

APIs and microservices are maturing — empowering innovation like never before and the creation of nimble apps that can rapidly respond to market changes. And with this growth comes the need to scale as APIs and Microservies move from what was once a technology for bleeding edge innovators to the foundation for widespread digital transformation.

We’ve outlined six practical ways that organizations can effectively scale their APIs and Microservicesacross their enterprise.

Organizations must develop a strategy and cast a vision for digital transformation. APIs and Microservices can play a significant role in this strategy — bringing them out of the development closet and into the board room to facilitate a broad organizational embrace.

Cast the development net widerBy leveraging intuitive management tools, make API and Microservices skillsets accessible to a broader range of developers, opening the door to increased innovation.

One bank, for instance, created a library of standardized APIs that software developers could use as needed for a wide variety of data-access tasks rather than having to figure out the process each time. The Results:

increase in new releases 5

Ensure distributed control

There are 20,435 open APIs in use today.6 This is expected to triple in the next year.7

Too much centralized control can hinder speed and innovation. A strong API and Microservices management platform can enable self-service provisioning to distribute control and give stakeholders much-needed visibility while allowing users to manage APIs with ongoing agility.

Refactoring existing monolithic applications one microservice at a time can significantly speed deployment, innovationand root cause analysis.

Align to the DevOps cycleAPIs and Microservice management solutions must align to the DevOps cycle — and must be made native for Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) to facilitate continuous change.

Embrace a management methodologyBecause Microservices break down applications into small component services, they can be abundant and a headache to manage. Thankfully, ISTIO creates a 'service mesh' to unify, connect, manage and secure Microservices.

Enable multi-platform deploymentFor APIs and Microservices to work at enterprise scale, management tools must work across multiple deployments — on-premises, in private clouds, public clouds and hybrid clouds.

respondents are adopting multi-cloud [hybrid] environments.10

Agility

Scalability

What are the top motivators for microservices adoption? 11

Releas

e

API Analytics Traffic Monitoring Business Analytics

Test API Testing Functional Non-Functional

Design API First API Review

Deploy Configuration Management PaaS Container Orchestration CI/CD

API Monetization Metering & Monitoring Partner-Billing Systems

API & MicroservicesManagement Visibility Policy Enforcement

Threat Detection & Access Control AI-Based Threat Detection OAuth

Code & Build API Creation Microservices Creation API Integration Policy, Design, creation and enforcement

Dev Portal

API Consumer Adoption Community Building

Plan

OperateBu

ild

DeployCode

MonitorTest

In a 2018 Dimensional Research survey, of respondents indicate that each additional microservice increases operational challenges.8

Google, IBM and Lyft released ISTIO as open source last year, and what a year it’s been. Since that first 0.1 release, ISTIO has improved and matured significantly, with eight versions, 200+ contributors, and 4,000+ check-ins adding an ever-growing set of functionality.9

4 5 82%78%

out of

1: https://interact.f5.com/rs/653-SMC-783/images/RPRT-SOAD-2018-global-final.pdf2: ibid3. https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/the-case-for-digital-reinvention4: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/what-it-really-takes-to-capture-the-value-of-apis5: ibid6: https://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory7: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/what-it-really-takes-to-capture-the-value-of-apis8: https://go.lightstep.com/global-microservices-trends-report-2018.html9: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/07/istio-reaches-1-0-ready-for-prod.html10: https://f5.com/Portals/1/Premium/Reports/F5-State-of-Application-Delivery-Report-2017.pdf11: https://go.lightstep.com/global-microservices-trends-report-2018.html

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APIs_and_Microservicesaxway.com

reported exploring new application architectures such as containers and microservices 2

of respondents stated that digital transformation is changing how they develop applications 1

In a 2018 F5 Networks

industry survey

47% 41%

reduction in product-development IT costs 4