What is API first design?
In this post we discuss the origins of API first application and system design and what it means for technology used by enterprises.
Every business now-days has to export / expose valuable data publicly. The value of well productive APIs to the business organization is becoming significant on the balance sheets.
Smart Devices
Let's take a look at the history and why APIs became critical part of most technology platforms.
Apple released their version of smartphone named iPhone in 2007. Smartphone design included full screen interface which made consumption of media and mobile applications very attractive for its users.
In a short time, the adoption of such smartphones skyrocketed. The use of mobile apps and games skyrocketed. There was no turning back.
Small screen devices rapidly became part of daily routine to billions of people around the World. Apple competitors in this space like Samsung joined the wave. Hundreds of thousands of apps became available to users.
Most of them needed data from various backend systems.
Internet of Things
Such demand for data integrations and data gave explosion to Internet of things. The number of software, devices and sensors connected via the Internet, started to grow exponentially.
Below graph illustrates the number of devices integrated via the Internet.
What is one thing majority of these devices have in common?
They all rely on communication protocols which power the Internet and APIs are the major cus communication pattern.
How it effects enterprise technology stack?
Before the explosion of integrated devices, the average digital enterprise technology platform was similar to this (high level view).
Business technology stack was mainly contained within internal boundaries. Only sharing generated HTML content / results with the user Internet browsers.
Large, monolithic technology architectures were working well. Business had full control of the data inside its data centre. Integrations with external systems were limited.
There was not much segmentation on the client side technology set.
Of course, some Internet browsers were behaving better than others in Web standard support. But There were 3 or 4 most popular Internet browsers available and that was all.
Frameworks like jQuery where helping us bridge the gap.
What changed?
With the number of smartphones and integrated devices rapidly growing, the way digital companies interact with their customers has suddenly changed.
Smart applications started running business logic based on integration data.
Organizations and enterprises had to provide public integrations (via the Internet) with a data sets they previously only accessed inside protected internal domain.
Suddenly, existing enterprise technology stack had to securely share all this business data - and expectations for more such data were (and still are) growing.
Smart device segmentation was also rapidly growing. More connected device builders where entering the market.
What about APIs?
The industry standard to expose all this data to applications was via publicly facing APIs or Application Programming Interfaces. Most of them based on HTTP specification.
REST APIs became de facto technology standard for sharing underlying platform data with external 3rd party apps.
Enterprise technology stack has accumulated yet another layer - API Management.
What is API first technology design?
API first technology design comes from small screen first necessity.
Sometime around 2017, the number of consumers navigating online via smartphones has surpass the number of consumers using desktop computers.
Which means that most of business technology platforms will shift the focus on the small screen devices first.
Likewise, any business technology platform should be built with API first design mindset for business data sharing.
Otherwise it would be very challenging to fulfil customer demands to served via small-screen devices.
To sum up, API first design approach is aimed at building platforms which allow business to create products out of their data assests and to facilitate business integrations with partners.