the api economy
DESCRIPTION
The construction of interstate railroads in the 19th century was a catalyst to more efficient and effective inter-state business throughout the US. In the 20th century, the telephone, inter-state highways, and the web provided similar benefits. In the 21st century, a prerequisite for the next leap in economic advancement is a simple way to integrate disparate business systems and enable cross-platform communications. This requirement is realized through RESTful services. With RESTful services, market-places that support Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers and consumers are possible. These market-places will provide consumers the ability to discover SaaS providers, and will also provide processes to facilitate business partnerships. Join us in this session as we go back in time to see how we got here and ponder the possibilities that lie ahead. We’ll take a look back at approaches that have been used in distributed systems engineering, and we’ll identify what’s different this time around. In closing, we’ll identify the challenges to players in the “API Economy”, all the while making a case for why we should all jump in.TRANSCRIPT
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved http://www.ServiceDesignPatterns.com
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
About Me
• Consultant, coach, trainer • Web Service and API design • REST • SOA • Distributed systems engineering
• Past Positions • Director of Architecture, Monster.com • Manager of Application Development, Fidelity.com
• Etc. • Author of Service Design Patterns • Frequent speaker at technology conferences • Podcasts, e-zine articles • Microsoft MVP
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
Enabling Technologies
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
The Internet is the New Highway! Thanks Al!
Web APIs are a compelling new
destination!
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
Application Programming Interface Defines how client developers invoke …
Native platform functions
Remote functions
Enables client developers to create new solutions
e.g. Amazon Web Services
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
We’re Talking About APIs for
Distributed Systems
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
“Logical computers” are assigned responsibility for individual tasks in a larger goal
Communication occurs through “messages”
Computer memory is not shared Note: not referring to clustered machines
Lack of central controller and “time clock”
Asynchronous, parallel processing
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
To scale and tune specific functions e.g. web servers, database servers, etc.
This concept is often scaled to higher abstraction levels … e.g. functional business areas
Workload distribution http://www.seti.org
Fault-tolerance
Natural divisions of labor Client apps (e.g. mobile, desktop) and server
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
Unreliable, slow networks Latency and bandwidth
Changing network topologies and protocols
Multiple administrators And they’re all human!!!
Security
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
How did we get here?
Let’s look back
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
Early Conferences Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing 1982
International Symposium on Distributed Computing 1985
TCP Socket programming Berkeley sockets, 1983
2-Tier Client-Server, 1980s, 1990s
3-Tier/N-Tier, 1990s, 2000s
Distributed objects (i.e. CORBA, DCOM)
Peer-to-Peer, 1990s and on
SOAP/WSDL, 2000s
RESTful Web APIs, 2000s
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
Simplicity productivity
Standardized, truly cross-platform
Choices Each platform has a plethora of frameworks to choose from
All implementing the same simple approach
Framework selection often determined by “stylistic differences” vs. capabilities
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
“A global market-place in which providers of automated “business services” compete for the attention of client developers” … Rob Daigneau
Relies on Web APIs i.e. HTTP specification, RFC 2616
Web APIs allow companies to Easily create and publish Business Services
i.e. SaaS offerings
Monetize these offerings
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
Thought Leadership We have an opportunity to define a new “platform” and (industry) standard
Gravitational Pull, Lock-in, e.g. ….
Sabre (reservation systems)
Microsoft (developer platform)
SalesForce (Force.com)
Apple (iTunes marketplace)
Facebook (Social Graph)
Several Revenue Opportunities
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
What Lies
Ahead?
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved
The API must be simple, intuitive, and flexible
Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
How to monetize? Per transaction, subscriptions, other?
How do customers find (or become aware of) your services?
Forget the UDDI approach
How do you evolve your API and meet the needs of different clients?
Copyright 2013, Rob Daigneau, All Rights Reserved