API Best Practices: Microservices
- by 7wData
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.
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