API Zen For Developers

Steven Willmott3scale Inc

@3scale - http://www.3scale.net

On Demand API Infrastructure: http://3scale.net @3scale

me: @njyx on twitter

Powering 450 APIsBillions API Calls / Month

Chicago 24-26th Septemberhttp://www.apistrategyconference.com

To the Content…

“Software is Eating the World”

Marc Andreessen – WSJ / August 2011

“APIs are Eating Software”

API Days San Francisco 2013

Almost every major industry is becoming software driven

MusicRetail Video Telephony

Meaning:

…

Examples

Lytro: “Software Defined Cameras”

Philips Hue: “Software ControlledLighting”

Amazon: “Software Driven Retail”

Pixar: “Software powered animation”

APIs Are Changing the Way we Write Software

But also:

API Based App Development

How are APIs Changing Application Development?

APIs are the new “Libs”

“In computer science, a library is a collection of implementations of behavior, written in terms of a language, that has a well-defined interface by which the behavior is invoked”

Credit: Wikipedia

Download & Add to Classpath

Became

Find and Integrate

Speed (Time to Market)

e.g. + Devops Borat

e.g.(Top Mashup on

Progr Web)

Richness / Functionality

e.g.

e.g.

Offboarding

e.g.

e.g.

(Rich Photo EffectsFor Mobile by SDK)

(Monitoring System in the Cloud)

Reliability

e.g.

e.g.

(Email by API)

(Amazon S3)

Mobile & Non Mobile

Single Page Apps

Buddhist Principles

Four Noble Truths

1. To live means to suffer.

2. The origin of suffering is attachment.

3. The cessation of suffering is attainable.

4. The path to the cessation of suffering.

To live means to suffer

Human beings are not perfect. Likewise, the world inhabited by them is also

ridden with imperfections.

The origin of suffering is attachment

the attachment to the desire to have (craving) and the desire not to have

(aversion)

The cessation of suffering is attainable

This liberation from attachment and sorrow frees the mind of all troubles

and worries.

The path to the cessation of suffering

Lead a Balanced life by following the Eightfold path which is a 'gradual

path of self-improvement'

Four Noble Truths of (Modern) App Development

1. There will be suffering – APIs and Tools are imperfect, likewise the world created by them.

2. Suffering is attachment – Dependencies create pain, breakages, frustration, as do unmet expectations.

3. The cessation of suffering is attainable – liberation from hard dependencies, graceful failure, alternatives, .

4. The path to the cessation of suffering – Wisdom in what is going to happen, Good Behaviour , putting your efforts into the right things.

APIs Inside…

The Eightfold Path is Zen

The Eightfold Path

• The right view

• The right thought

• The right speech

• The right action

• The right Livelyhood

• The right Effort

• The right Mindfullness

• The right Concentration

}

}}

Wisdom

Ethical Conduct

Concentration

Back to the Real World

Recognize the opportunity and Chaos of API Powered APP Development

The Imperfect World

Software Before 1995 Software 1995 – 2010 Software 2010 -

APIs are NOT Like Libs…

They Change & Break

Beware of the Type of API & App

VIEW = FORM

MODEL = DATA

CONTROLLER = BUSINESS LOGIC

Model

View Controller

How Attached are you…?

To Live means to suffer

Apps Tend to be Complex

10 Hard Things About Attachment…

• Interface Definition & Consistency

• Latency

• Slow or Dead?

• Distributed State Synchronization

• Remote Clock Problems

• Error Detection

• Change Management

• Static & Dynamic Testing

• Code Validation / Verification

• Frame Problems

But Wait…

It’s even harder than that …

Distributed Across Organizational Boundaries

• No access to source code

• No knowledge of Server Environment

• Security and Access Permissions Everywhere

• Identity Problems

• Shared Semantics are much harder to achieve

• Unknown / Mismatched Scale Issues

• Danger of Much Wider Interdependencies –Frame problem is worse!)

Most of these problems are completely unaddressed

Need to be if we are to reach 100’s of thousands of APIs

Progress Today

R&D / Experimental

• Distributed Verification

• Distributed Systems Contracts

• Semantic Web Ontologies

• Service Descriptions?

Tools

• API Science, API Metrics

• APITools, Runscope

• API-Hub

• Swagger

• Pingdom et. al.

Lots of Interesting Problems to be Solved!

Stuff We Do

Make APIs Better…

• http://3scale.net

• Onboarding, Docs, Version Management, Communications, …

Help Developers…

• http://apitools.com

• Track & manipulate traffic, alert, cache, analyze, …

Strategies to Avoid Headaches

API Provider

• Publish Specifications

• Handle Versioning Carefully

• Provision for Scale & Rate Limit

• Code Libraries

• Buffers, Queues, Webhooksand Asychronous Responses

• Multiple Data Centers

Tools

• Monitoring

• Caching

• Mocks for Testing

• Buffers & Queues

• Failover Services

• Graceful Failure Modes

• Assume Failure Will happen

Conclusions

Take Away’s

1

2

API Driven Development is an Awesome new Frontier

But it’s incredibly hard if you get attached

=>Take a deep breath and find the Zen path to distributed systems..

Keep Building!

steve@3scale.net

@njyx, @3scale

We make awesome API management tools:

http://www.3scale.net/