Going Borderless

An explosion of SaaS based APIs, an increased comfort level with dependencies and market pressures on businesses to focus on their core domains has created an ideal time for a new API strategy: going borderless.

What would your business look like if you treated other people's services as your own?

Transcript

1. The Next API Strategy: Going Borderless 1 Ronnie Mitra @mitraman ronnie.mitra@publicissapient.com
2. Ronnie Mitra 2 Consultant and author @mitraman ronnie.mitra@publicissapient.com
3. Our story so far 3 … gave us SOAP APIs in the Enterprise 2000s Webservices 2010s APIs Now Microservices … gave developers a ”seat at the table” … is giving us to engineering optimizations at scale
4. But, if we stop focusing on the APIs, we can see that the world has changed around us… 4 https://cardconnect.com/launchpointe/tech-trends/rise-of-saas There are 15,529 SaaS companies in the world, according to a list of SaaS companies obtained from Crunchbase in June 2020.
5. 5 In the SaaS world, with rising expectations APIs are now ”Hygiene” that means, there are a lot of APIs in the ecosysteem Now 2000s 2010s SaaS customer satisfaction APIs are a ”delighter” APIs are good to have APIs are assumed to exist
6. One more step on the stack of dependencies 6 Network and Storage Servers Supporting Capabilities Core Capabilities Virtual Machines Middleware Hosting IaaS PaaS SaaS YOU ARE HERE You need all of this To deliver your core domain’s value
7. It’s the right time to think borderless 7 what would your business look like if you always used other people’s services?
8. consumption is the new competitive advantage for API strategy embrace a borderless mindset to become a better consumer. 8
9. …but becoming a better consumer is difficult… 9 Using one API is easy. Using a lot of of them is not. You’ll need to build a system to solve problems: • Engaging providers • Integrating with APIs • Orchestrating functions • Observing the system • Simplifying the architecture
10. Engagement is difficult and analog based 10 Selection & Procurement Provider engagement is not digitized or automated Your Cost: you’ll need to develop a selection, evaluation and engagement capability • Ecosystem Maps • Market Scan • Assessment • Contract and Procurement • Relationship Management Engagement Capabilities: You must bound commercial changes the same way you bound Microservices!
11. You can’t change someone else’s API 11 Proxy APIs Provider APIs are brittle and tightly coupled Your Cost: Build proxy APIs as an abstraction for data, protocols, security and messaging models Payments Machine Learning You You’ll need to own testing and observability of upstream dependencies!
12. Capabilities don’t interoperate 12 Choregraphed Microservices Journeys need to be orchestrated Your Cost: Build a layer of choregraphed microservices to weave capabilities together There is a big centralization/de- centralization trade-off decision here. Payments Machine Learning
13. The data is all over the place 13 Event Log and Unified Data View Data needs to be collected and catalogued to be useful Your Cost: Build a data management capability at the centre of your system • Event logging • Data retrieval • Cleansing/Transformation/Normalization • Reporting • AI/ML Data Management Capabilities:
14. The system is difficult to understand and manage 14 Centralized Access and Management (Control/Management plane) The complexity of the system needs to be hidden Your Cost: Build access and management components that represent a monolith • APIs for UX • APIs for ecosystems and 3 rd parties • Business consoles • Operator consoles • Borderless service catalogs: • APIs you own • APIs you use • APIs you could use Usability Capabilities:
15. This is a microservices architecture that pretends it owns someone else’s APIs. It is borderless. 15 Selection & Procurement Choregraphed Microservices Anti-Corruption Layer(s) Event Log and Unified Data View Centralized Access and Management (Control/Management plane)
16. The Next API Strategy: Going Borderless 16 Ronnie Mitra @mitraman ronnie.mitra@publicissapient.com