Build API Economy

Hello and welcome.

Here is a brief description of our recent publication on Enterprise Architecture approach to build API economy. The IT industry has seen many transformations in the software development, lifecycle methodologies, and development approaches.

SDLC has ranged from waterfall to agile and the development approaches from monolith to micro services. The recent advances in cloud native micro service based development approaches have created an API economy in modern enterprises, the API act as contracts and carry business value. In this publication, we describe an approach to designing micro services, and API based on stakeholder needs and describe an Enterprise Architecture Framework for micro service based cloud-native development. Micro services, widespread adoption of agile project management, independent delivery with micro services and automated deployment with DevOps has tremendously sped up the system’s development.

The real game changer is a continuous integration and continuous deployment. Organizations can do multiple releases a day known as continuous delivery, shortening the test release and deployment cycles from weeks to minutes.

The maturity of container technologies like Docker and container orchestration platforms, like Kubernetes, has promoted microservices architecture, especially in cloud-native development. Various tools are available for setting up CI slash CD pipelines. While organizations are moving away from monolith applications and moving towards microservices-based architectures.

They can quickly accumulate hundreds of such micro services. Micro services are provisioned and accessed via application programming interfaces API. While CI slash CD tools and DevOps processes offer speed and time to market, microservices, reusability lifecycle management and monetization may not be materialized. Unless microservices and API are linked to enterprise-wide stakeholders needs.

The link between stakeholders’ needs and microservices slash API is not well captured nor adequately defined. In this publication, we describe a structured method to create a logical link among microservices-based agile development and enterprise stakeholders’ viewpoint concerns. This method enables capturing and documenting enterprise-wide stakeholder’s means whether these are business owners, planners, product owners, architects, designers, developers, DevOps engineers, or the partners and subscribers of an enterprise.

The taxonomies created with this method enable enterprises to effectively associate business value to API, manage the lifecycle, use management tools, prescribe rate limits, and govern API, thus enabling the API economy in an enterprise. With the advent of microservices-based cloud-native developments, organizations are facing another challenge known as bimodal IT Gartner defines bimodal IT as the practice of managing two separate coherent modes of IT delivery, one is focused on stability and the other on agility. Most legacy systems may fulfill their functional requirements. These are not scalable or interoperable with modern micro services-based architectures.

The framework presented in this publication enables dealing with bimodal IT challenges by providing tools to bridge the gap between these two disjoint worlds. Please Visit www.ml soft.ai for more information and stay tuned for a tool to design API using the stakeholder needs.