Here at Sonoa we are in the API business – helping companies open and consume. Today is an API Revolution of sorts. So, the question we sometimes encounter is what’s an API and why should your company have one?
So why do you need an API? For one thing, everyone else is diving into the API economy and your business needs to stay competitive. Yes, APIs let your company drive more revenue opportunities, but they also help you stay instep with, and often ahead of, the competition. There’s an awesome post by Kipp Bodnar on this subject and the API as the next marketing platform: http://digitalcapitalism.com/2009/04/api-marketing.
Now that you know that you need an API to expand business, you face certain issues with API development and deployment.
API Design: As always start with KISS (keep it simple stupid). You need simple design to address two basic principles: make your API easy to use and hard to misuse, and make it easy to extend. Joshua Bloch has written extensively on this subject.
API Deployment: lets start with visibility. As one of our customers says, “you need to see the needle to move the needle.” Next comes control: authentication, threat protection, rate limiting, etc. If you’re familiar with Sonoa, this is what we do – we’re helping people expose their APIs by giving them this visibility and control. It’s a great time to expand your services with an API – just be sure to cover your apps before jumping out there. API development and deployment is a critical subject that I’ll be writing more about in the weeks to come.
