The Case For an API-First SCM
Somewhere around a decade ago, about the time DevOps really started to manifest, we began seeing technology companies—including some of the largest ones today—investing heavily in their APIs. API-first companies managed to rapidly gain widespread adoption because of the benefits of being API-driven. Everything from automation and scalability to flexibility, performance, speed and monetization. Once […]
The API Life Cycle Mixer’s Manual: What Goes Into a Single Source of Truth?
In bartending, the mixer’s manual is a trusted source of information. These books can contain hundreds of recipes for classic cocktails, some of which might be 100 years old, while others might be for drinks that only recently arrived on the scene. Mixer’s manuals also can be great sources of inspiration for new, yet-to-be-tested recipes […]
State of Developer Experience Report Finds Growing API Reliance
Web APIs continue to grow in interest among developer users. APIs can empower new customer experiences and help engineers avoid rebuilding common functions. The technology is also powering microservices and headless architectures that we’ve seen gain more traction in recent years as enterprises become more composable. On the provider side, a web API strategy can […]
Modern DevOps is a Chance to Make Security Part of the Process
I’ve mentioned before, and many of you have lived through, the slowly changing beliefs around DevOps versus security. We are past the days of “Security slows us down” and into “How can we bake security into the development process?” which is essential. Indeed, I would say it’s more essential every day as the number of […]
Tips For Standardizing API Life Cycle Management
Software life cycle management is becoming more critical for today’s technology-fueled organizations—because you can’t just release software into the world and expect it to work perfectly for years to come. More often than not, development teams must constantly adapt their software, progressively add features and cater to new use cases as they arise. This is nothing […]
Index Tracks Impressive Growth of API-First Startups
APIs are the building blocks of modern software, and their use continues to grow around the globe. A full 89% of investment into APIs will increase or stay the same over the next 12 months, Postman’s 2022 State of the API report found. And the evolving API-first approach is ushering in many innovations and startups […]
Introduction to MACH Architecture
In recent years, the need to construct end-to-end digital experiences has become increasingly important. But to deliver new features and services promptly, organizations must double down on agility and reusability. As part of this trend, applications have become increasingly modular, often constructed using pre-built microservices and integrating common SaaS to avoid reinventing the wheel. MACH […]
Choosing the Right API Solution
There are more choices than ever when it comes to APIs–and that’s a good thing. But it also means you’ll need a strategic plan for choosing the right API solution. Two questions I’ve found can help guide that decision: What problem are you trying to solve right now? What functionality will you need in the […]
‘The OG App’ Devs’ Facebook Ban | WFH Vs. NYC Real Estate | Calif. Pay Law is GO
In this week’s The Long View: A third party Instagram app causes ructions, remote work causes office slump, and more on Cali’s salary transparency law
Empathy for the API Developer
Security teams have always been perceived as an impediment to delivery by software teams who feel that security imposes arbitrary and unreasonable policies and use poorly-integrated tools that are beset with high false-positive rates. With the advent of DevOps, security has been seen as an increasing obstacle to rapid deployment cycles. Security teams believe developers […]
3 Ways API Analytics Can Help Application Owners
Software development is fraught with risk that can run projects aground like a ship against a rocky beach. Whether it is misunderstood requirements, rapidly evolving marketplaces or old-fashioned bugs and schedule slippage, all can derail otherwise well-resourced and managed software development projects. Even when software development teams eventually ship their product and collect payment from […]
Hasura SDK Integrates GraphQL Platform With More Data Sources
At its HasuraCon ’22 conference, Hasura today announced the early release of a software development kit (SDK) that extends the reach of its GraphQL platform to additional data sources. In addition, Hasura is making generally available integrations with the GitHub repository, support for OpenTelemetry Traces within the Hasura Cloud Platform and Microsoft SQL event triggers. […]
The APIs You Really Don’t Know About
A few years ago, we were rightly warned about the amount of exposure our APIs created. A massive attack surface that often used “security by obscurity” as its primary method of protection. We’ve come a long way since then, building secrets, tokens, RBAC and even more into our API interfaces. We’re still behind in getting […]
Smoothing the Transition From REST to GraphQL
Since its open source release in 2015, GraphQL has taken the development world by storm. GraphQL, the query language originally developed by Facebook, is a big boon for frontend developers, as it enables you to grab the exact data you need with a single request. This solves the problems of over-fetching and under-fetching, which classical […]
Taking a DevSecOps Approach to API Security
An application programming interface (API) is a data transfer approach that enables services within an application to talk to other applications (or other services within a system). Essentially, it enables Service A to talk to Service B in a uniform way. Companies benefit from APIs on a daily basis without even thinking about them. APIs […]
Digital Business Transformation Driving More API Adoption
A global annual survey of 2,200 developers published today by RapidAPI, a provider of an application programming interface (API) hub, finds digital business transformation initiatives have led to an increase in reliance on external-facing APIs. According to the survey results, nearly three-quarters of developers (74%) are using APIs for internal applications. However, nearly half (49%) […]
API Sprawl a Looming Threat to Digital Economy
New estimates say the total number of public and private APIs in use is approaching a whopping 200 million. APIs are becoming increasingly crucial to the global digital economy. They are the backbone of many digital platforms and drive the composable enterprise model. But this ubiquity presents sprawl issues. F5 recently released a study that […]
Akamai Brings Web Application and API Security Together
Akamai Technologies, Inc. this week launched a service that consolidates the process of securing both web applications and application programming interfaces (APIs). Amol Mathur, vice president of product management and strategy for Akamai, said with the launch of App & API Protector the managed security services provider is making it easier for IT teams to […]
Salt Security Adds Support for GraphQL APIs
Salt Security has extended its platform for securing application programming interfaces (APIs) to include support for APIs built using GraphQL. GraphQL is an open source data query and manipulation language for APIs that was originally developed by Facebook. It provides a more efficient approach to querying data than the REST APIs that are widely used […]
HashiCorp Previews Updates to Consul Service Mesh
During an online HashiConf Global conference, HashiCorp today made available a beta of an update to its open source Consul service mesh for virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters that makes it possible for multiple administrators to share the same instance of a multitenant service mesh. Version 1.11 of Consul will also add support for a […]
Mastering API Gateways for the Modern Cloud-Native Enterprise
As modern enterprises continue migrating to the cloud and the need for connected applications and devices dramatically increases, API-driven architectures are being widely adopted. In addition to the convenience of being able to efficiently connect and share resources, organizations benefit from the innovation and accelerated development speed that APIs bring in multi-cloud environments. APIs are […]
Hasura Extends Scope of GraphQL API Platform
During its online an HasuraCon ’21 conference, Hasura today announced that it has made it possible for developers to employ GraphQL application programming interface (APIs) to launch queries against data residing in multiple databases. At the same time, Hasura announced a preview of schema sharing capabilities along with support for workflows based on GitOps processes […]
Akamai Adds Service to Optimize API Traffic
Akamai today launched an API Acceleration service specifically designed to accelerate application programming interface (API) calls using special purpose hardware, reserved capacity and prioritized routing. At the same time, the company is also making available a globally distributed key-value store dubbed EdgeKV that enables stateful applications to be deployed on its EdgeWorker nodes. Finally, Akamai […]