Evolving from a monolithic to a distributed public API

API Days 2012

Transcript

1. Evolving from a monolithic to a distributed public API
   - API Days 2012
   

   View Slide

2. Chris O'Dell
   Current API Team Lead Developer
   @ChrisAnnODell
   Hibri Marzook
   Senior Developer/ Former API Team Lead
   @Hibri
   

   View Slide

3. •
   Providers of open access to the broadest catalogue of fully licensed,
   high quality digital music
   •
   Over 22 million legal, high quality tracks
   •
   Open to consumers, partners and developers
   Who are 7digital?
   

   View Slide

4. •
   Started as a side project providing access to our catalogue
   •
   Features driven by client demand
   •
   A single monolithic API application
   •
   Written in C# .Net WebForms
   •
   Lots of shared libraries with other applications
   •
   Single team working on the API
   Where we came from
   

   View Slide

5. View Slide

6. How do we scale ?
   

   View Slide

7. •
   Architectural shift to SOA-ish
   •
   Make monolithic API route to smaller focussed internal APIs.
   Changing for scale
   

   View Slide

8. •
   Move code from main API codebase to new internal APIs.
   •
   Rewrite where possible
   •
   External consumers did not see any change in behaviour
   •
   Slow evolution, not a big rewrite.
   Making the change
   

   View Slide

9. •
   Smaller, focused teams
   •
   Assigned Product Managers for each product and team
   •
   Reduced size of work items
   •
   Introduced Kanban
   •
   Change technology stack behind the public facing API
   Changing how we work
   

   View Slide

10. •
    Shared libraries gradually being replaced by internal APIs
    •
    A skeleton of the monolith remains as the public façade for routing
    requests
    •
    Able to deploy each API individually
    •
    Each API can employ specific caching and scaling strategies
    •
    Independent and multiple technology stacks – Windows & Linux
    •
    More chaos.
    Where we are now
    

    View Slide

11. View Slide

12. How do we deal with
    the chaos ?
    

    View Slide

13. •
    Increase testability.
    •
    Small projects with little code are easier to build and maintain.
    •
    Invested in time and tools to automate build and deployment.
    •
    We now have single click deployment.
    •
    We average 50 production releases in a week
    •
    Changes can be tested and deployed in under an hour
    •
    Metrics. Measure things. We use NewRelic and Statsd
    Limit the impact of chaos
    

    View Slide

14. We build our own applications using the API
    • 7digital.com, built by internal teams
    • Mobile apps built by 3rd parties working for us
    • Dev teams focus on building the platform
    Dogfooding
    

    View Slide

15. We don't build internal
    tools
    - we build APIs
    

    View Slide

16. • Tools are built on top of APIs
    • Every business process can now be monetized
    • Don't implement an API until it is needed
    Build the platform
    

    View Slide

17. •
    Language and platform agnostic
    •
    Gave us more breadth and exposure across the market.
    •
    Open protocols, HTTP, OAuth 1.0 (yes we hate it too)
    •
    https://github.com/7digital
    Open Platform, Open Source
    

    View Slide

18. We are not a startup
    any more
    

    View Slide

19. Samsung, Microsoft, Blackberry and many more...
    Who is building on our open platform
    

    View Slide

20. Interested in working with us ?
    - or learning more ? Come talk to us
    Sign up for a free public API Key
    - http://developer.7digital.net/
    We are hiring
    - http://about.7digital.com/jobs/
    @ChrisAnnODell @Hibri
    

    View Slide