Joining the API economy

We’ve all heard about the API economy and the extra revenue it can provide while increasing the network and visibility of the business. We will be discussing the processes and advice for how you would actually join the API economy.

Types of API’s

There are basically two areas of API’s:

• Internal API’s that are never exposed to the outside world, and are generally intended for a micro-service architecture. The benefits and challenges of this will be discussed in a separate post.
• Externally exposed API’s that offer data and services to 3rd parties. These can either be free or paid.

This post will deal with externally exposed API’s. Purely internal API’s are not strictly part of the API economy, these are services within the company.

Moving into the API economy

The decision to move into the API economy might require a cultural shift within your business, and one that can be that would be very beneficial. It is primarily a business decision, rather than being left solely to the IT department to find ways of using the data that they have collected for the benefit of the business. This is a good thing! It requires all of the business to get together and decide on what data they want to share, is there already enough data to share, what extra data and metrics need to be collected, how will this be collected, does the data need to be changed. etc.

Approach

I would recommend taking a top-down approach to this, rather than launching your IT dept into coding your great idea. The planning of this is very much a business decision, and each department should be involved at nearly every stage, as you move from project inception to meetings and discussions of potential merits of the plan and ideas this will spawn, through to final planning and execution.

This might require a cultural change in your departments, as the different departments start to think about what assets they have or can create to be added to the API suite. They will probably find that they need to change processes and approaches in order to fully embrace this.

REST APIs

Defining what a REST API can do is a separate topic for another post. But essentially, it is built on the rather convenient request types in a HTML request:

• POST
• GET
• PUSH/PUT
• DELETE

These allow for Create, Read, Update and Delete requests to be made over the API. If you want to impress your IT team, the acronym for this is CRUD. Thus, you can merely Read (i.e. GET) data or you can also Create (POST), Update (Push or Put) and Delete (DELETE) data.

GraphQL APIs

Defining what a GraphQL API can do is another separate topic for a post. But essentially, it is addresses one of the shortcomings of the REST structure: meta-links.

REST has a shortcoming in that you cannot specify data selection parameters and related items in the same request without a custom attributes in the query. So this leads to multiple round trips and requests, e.g. fetch all posts, then the for each post. Each of these items would then contain links for subsequent requests to fetch each things like comments or taxonomy terms for each post. This can significantly increase the data loading time.

GraphQL addresses this problem by allowing an API request to include data structure and request elements in it. Thus, you can fetch your data in one request.

Commercial benefits

Commercial benefits should be made to either make the API’s free or only accessed through a payment gateway and account access to the API’s. Once that is decided upon, Security and volume loads need to be considered. With the explosion of free and commercially driven API’s along with the massive increase in Javascript frameworks and headless architecture, traffic for the could potentially be high, so provision will have to made in the server architecture to be scalable. This is a huge topic for a separate post.

Thought should be made into what service you are providing to 3rd parties and customers:

• What benefits will they get from these new data and service endpoints?
• How easy will it be to use and access?
• What will the format of the data be?
• Will the customers require any customisation and tailoring to their needs of the services? For instance, Uber’s custom requirements from Google maps API’s
• Is there a business model for customisation, etc?

If access to the API is going to be limited to paying customers or selected 3rd parties then access control needs to be implemented. This is where ApiOpenStudio and some other API frameworks come into their own. You can define users, departmental and account roles for individual users or groups and then define what access rights these roles have to individual API resources. Perhaps you only want to give a 3rd party Read access to specific data, whilst giving one of your departments full Create/Read/Update/Delete access to all or a subset of the data. Maybe your API model wants to enable a 3rd party or department the ability to control their own silo’d data – so that data would be private to them, but they would have Create/Read/Update/Delete to their own data and only they would have access to it over the API’s (with the exception of you monitoring the data for security, API request rates and data volume control).

Creating your APIs

Before you dive straight into creation of the API’s, you should also consider the API’s from the user’s viewpoint. How easy will they be to use, do they provide data in the format that is most easy for me to consume, how will I discover these resources, i there any benefit for me to create code to consume the API’s, what other competitive resources are out there, are they better?

Once you have decided on the basic API model that you want to provide, you can start getting down to the nitty gritty of defining each resource and what it will do. ApiOpenStudio, and paid-for-services like MuleSoft will allow you to import API resource definitions from Swagger. If the API resources need processing logic on the data before final delivery, this should be defined and created. This is very simple in ApiOpenStudio, it is designed specifically to make this quick and easy. Meaning you do not need to employ expensive developers who are experts in a specific coding language to implement them (which can also be a time costly exercise).

Once you are ready to go, you need to pay specific attention the marketing of the new API suite. If you just put it out there and wait for the customers to come in, it is almost certainly going to fail. It is very important to put thought into how you will let people and companies know about the API. Maybe an email blast to your customers, creation of a specific website for the suite to expose it to the public, blogging, getting listed in aggregate listings of API’s, etc.