API Best Practices: Microservices

API Best Practices: Microservices

We’ll cover the important role an API platform plays in managing microservices architecture.

Nearly 70% of organizations claim to be either using or investigating microservices, and nearly one-third currently use them in production, according to research from NGINX.

Why? Because microservices enable businesses to innovate faster: development teams can independently develop, deploy, and scale components of large applications. The adoption of the cloud, containers, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools has made microservices implementation much easier, leading to more and more modern software being built as a set of microservices.

App development teams implement microservices using a variety of microservices stacks like Kubernetes, Netflix OSS, and Mesos, depending on their needs. All these microservices use web APIs as the mechanism to communicate with one another.

There’s a challenging side effect, however. As app development teams rush to implement microservices, they inadvertently create silos with inconsistencies in security, visibility, documentation, and governance. Many of the APIs that connect microservices are not secured consistently across the organization.

They might not be accompanied by standardized documentation, or access control mechanisms. These microservices and associated APIs are often difficult to reuse, analyze, or even to discover for use by other teams. How do organizations wrangle with this problem?  Many organizations implementing microservices use API management platforms to deliver consistent security, visibility, and improve discovery and reuse of microservices and APIs. When it comes to security, there should be no distinction between internal and external APIs. A microservice could be used by another app in the cloud today and an external partner tomorrow. Teams implement APIs with varying levels of security. Some deploy microservices in the public cloud, neglect to deploy common API security standards or consistent global policies, and expose the enterprise to potential security breaches. Companies like TrustPilot and Autodesk assume a zero-trust environment for microservices. They use API platforms to implement security and governance policies like spike arrest, injection threat protection, and OAuth2 across all of their microservices APIs. For many who adopt microservices, initial projects involve decomposing existing monolithic applications into microservices. Often, many applications take advantage of services from your monolithic apps. So transitioning to microservices has to be done in a way that’s not disruptive to other applications and developers using the monolith’s services. Magazine Luiza, a fifty-year-old retailer in Brazil with more than 700 stores and 43 million customers, created a modern API facade with an API platform to deliver modern (RESTful, cached, and secured) APIs for the monolithic app’s legacy SOAP services and to  securely expose the new microservices. This enabled mobile and web app developers to keep innovating despite the underlying transition to microservices.

Share it:
Share it:

[Social9_Share class=”s9-widget-wrapper”]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

You Might Be Interested In

How big data will transform shipping

5 Aug, 2017

Imagine a world where the inanimate objects of the shipping industry could talk. What would today’s ships tell us about …

Read more

Advanced and Predictive Analytics (APA) Software Market is Expected to Exceed CAGR of 8.6% by 2020

1 Jan, 2017

The growth of the Advanced and Predictive Analytics (APA) software market is primarily driven by the implementation of Big Data …

Read more

What is the Future of Data Governance for the Financial Services Sector?

9 Nov, 2016

In the past few years, the Financial Services Sector has been working to comply with a range of regulations that …

Read more

Do You Want to Share Your Story?

Bring your insights on Data, Visualization, Innovation or Business Agility to our community. Let them learn from your experience.

Get the 3 STEPS

To Drive Analytics Adoption
And manage change

3-steps-to-drive-analytics-adoption

Get Access to Event Discounts

Switch your 7wData account from Subscriber to Event Discount Member by clicking the button below and get access to event discounts. Learn & Grow together with us in a more profitable way!

Get Access to Event Discounts

Create a 7wData account and get access to event discounts. Learn & Grow together with us in a more profitable way!

Don't miss Out!

Stay in touch and receive in depth articles, guides, news & commentary of all things data.