Demystifying APIs and Microservices

(Paper presented at MuleSoft Connect Conference 2017, San Francisco)

Reducing the time to innovate products and services and increasing IT assets access through APIs and microservices has been identified as key priority for the customer-facing organization (Forrester 2016, Deloitte Tech Trends 2015, 2016). In the age of customer, it is becoming even more important as customers demand better experience across channels, and market competition forces organization to innovate and provide better products and services at lower price.

This Point of View paper identifies and addresses key challenges faced by organizations that are embarking on the journey to expose IT assets via microservices and APIs. It explains that microservices are granular business oriented services that are combined to produce higher level process and experience services. APIs are different from the old approach of SOA in that APIs are more amenable to discovery, access and reuse by a large developer ecosystem of internal and external partners. The three-layer architecture of data, process and experience microservices is discussed and corresponding lessons learned are explained.

The paper further discusses the elements critical from strategic point of view, namely, ownership of leading the innovation and technical implementation, holistic approach, organizational change management, inherent trade-offs, relationship to DevOps, governance etc. Lessons learned and leading practices identified for building distributed systems are reviewed with specific focus on MuleSoft Anypoint platform features that facilitate quick and efficient delivery of microservices and APIs.

An example of financial retail company is given to correlate concepts with a real life scenario. It is expected that organizations implementing microservices and APIs will benefit from this paper.