Data Management at Scale

Chapter 4. Services and API Management: The API Architecture

This chapter will cover the API Architecture, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and many modern data patterns. We’ll take a look at enterprise application integration, service orchestration and choreography, service (data) models, microservices, service meshes, GraphQL, and more. By the end of this chapter, you’ll have a solid grasp of the modern service-oriented architectures used to build scalability in distributed and real-time software systems. You will also understand how this architecture fits into the bigger picture and relates to the RDS Architecture, which we discussed in Chapter 3.

Introducing the API Architecture

The API Architecture, as you can imagine, receives its name from the application programming interface (API), which allows applications, software components, and services to communicate directly. Operational, transactional, and analytical systems that need to access each other’s data or initiate processes in real time are good examples of API patterns; so is interaction with cloud companies, external companies, and social networks. Services can also play a role when you, as a company, want to offer a rich user communication for your online digital channels. For example, users who are visiting the website of a travel agency might simultaneously see available flights and schedules from an airline operator.

The majority of API communication is synchronous and uses a request-response pattern, in which ...