Modern businesses prioritize delivering value to customers through experimentation. Transitioning to decentralized microservice architectures provides the agility needed for experimentation. The modern approach to APIs is bottom-up development, giving prominence to API developers. APIs need governance through a control plane and should be composable and scalable for cloud-native applications. API security involves content inspection, identity verification, and pattern analysis. Insights from APIs help evaluate business objectives and alignment.

1. Delivering the Modern API:
Know What it Takes
Nuwan Dias - @nuwandias
Senior Director, API Architecture

2. /me
● Twitter - @nuwandias
● Product Manager - WSO2 API Manager.
● Software Architect at heart. Enjoys building software that simplifies human life.
● API enthusiast ( APIs).
● Co-author of Microservices Security in Action.

3. Image source: newsd.in
Modern Businesses are Consumer Driven
● Delivering value to our customers is
our #1 priority.
● This requires lots of experimentation,
trial and error.
● We need to build a platform that
allows us to fail fast.
● A decentralized micro platform would
give us the agility we need to do this.

4. The Journey Towards a Trillion Endpoints
CONSUMER DEMAND
SUPPLIERS DISAGGREGATE ARCHITECTURE TO MEET DEMAND
Scale and agility are pushing
app disaggregation...
…that makes hybrid
integration the unspoken
challenge of all cloud
services
MONOLITHIC
BUSINESS APP
ENTERPRISE
APPS
DEPARTME
NTAL APPS
SAAS APPS
PUBLIC /
PRIVATE APIS
SERVERLESS &
MICROSERVICES
1970s
|
MAINFRAME
1980s
|
IT
AWAKENING
1990s
|
INTERNET
2000s
|
MOBILE
2010s
|
IoT/AI
2020+
|
DIGITAL NATIVE
1
10
102
103
105
109

5. From Microservices to APIs
APIs
Microservices

6. Traditional Delivery Model of an API
What we follow today mostly is a top down approach to delivering APIs
API design and
documentation
API publishing
API discovery and
consumption
Application
development

7. ● Developer/Code first APIs.
● CI/CD from day one.
● !SOA
Agile Enterprises Require Bottom-up
Delivery of APIs
Build, Deploy,
Test, Repeat
API
Documentation
Publish API Build Applications

8. Governance
Image source: National Geographic

9. Governance
API
Microservice
API API
Microservice Microservice
API Lifecycle
Manager
API
PortalsControl Plane
DataPlane

10. Composability
Image source: http://saless.com

11. Composability
API
Data
Services
Message
Queues
Microservice
(REST/HTTP)
Microservice
(gRPC)
Microservice
(webSockets)

12. API Security
API
AI/ML
Scans messages
for content Identify verification and
authorization
Firewall
Continuous learning and
pattern identification
1
2
3
APIGateway

13. APIAPIAPIAPIAPI
Scale
Metrics to care about
● Latency
● Boot-up delay
● Independence/Isolation
● State replication
API API APIAPIAPI

14. Availability

15. The Future of API Management is Hybrid
API
API Publisher
API Portals
API
API
API
Control Plane
Hybrid Data Plane
Azure
G-Cloud
AWS
K8S On-Prem

16. Insights
● Operational
Insights
● Diagnose Errors
● Scale Services
● Control Access
● Evaluate Business
Objectives
● Realign APIs

17. Summary
● Delivering value to our customers is our #1 priority.
● Transitioning into decentralized, micro architectures give us the ability to experiment
more.
● Modern APIs are developed bottom-up, giving more prominence to the API developer.
● The control plane allows us to govern APIs.
● APIs should be composable, collecting heterogeneous services.
● API security is 3 fold. Content inspection, identity verification and pattern analysis.
● APIs should be easily and quickly scalable for cost effectiveness in the cloud native
world
● 9’s availability is no more. Demand is for 100% availability.
● API insights help evaluate business objectives against alignment of APIs.

18. THANK YOU
wso2.com