Mastering API Architecture

Foreword

When I built my first APIs at the Financial Times, over a decade ago, there weren’t too many of them. We were building on a monolithic architecture, and the APIs were solely there for external third parties to get access to our content.

Now though, APIs are everywhere and they are core to your success when building a system.

That’s because, over the last decade, a couple of things have combined to change the way many of us do software development.

Firstly, the technology available for us changed. The rise of cloud computing gave us self-service, on-demand provisioning. Automated build and deployment pipelines allowed us to do continuous integration and deployment, and containers and associated technologies like orchestration let us run large numbers of small, independent services as a distributed system.

Why are we doing that? Because of the second thing: the research showing that successful software development organizations have loosely coupled architectures and autonomous, empowered teams. Successful here is defined in terms of a positive impact on the business: increased market share, productivity, and profitability.

Our architectures now tend to be more loosely coupled, distributed, and built around APIs. You want your APIs to be discoverable, consistent, and unlikely to cause problems to the consumers even if they change unexpectedly or disappear. Anything else will couple work together and slow down your teams.

In this book, James, Daniel and Matthew provide a ...