DeveloperWeek Austin 2019

This presentation takes you through the Journey of API Lifecycle, covering the following topics- Evolution, Backward Compatibility, Monitoring and Transformation of APIs. It comes from a first hand experience of building an API stack that a multi billion dollar enterprise bets on.

APIs built around your company's core business functionality will last forever. Customers who have integrated with the legacy XML / SOAP APIs usually do not invest in new integration unless they want new features. On the other hand, you as an API Producer need to stay on top of technology to attract and ease the new developer integration. You need to keep up with latest technology in all areas including error handling, security, and API protocols such as Restful and JSON. You may have to maintain different flavors of the APIs to keep both existing and new customers happy. But at the same time you have to keep in mind the cost of maintenance of the multiple flavor APIs and need to prevent duplicate code by building the protocol/security layer on top of the common code. This presentation talks about the evolution of the APIs with examples of supporting multiple protocol APIs.

When your company's core business APIs are integrated by large and critical customer base, it is crucial to be sensitive and backward compatible to customer's integration as the new features get rolled out. This talk covers in detail, the approach towards backward compatibility of an API with respect to changes to request, changes to response and changes to validation rules / business logic. In this presentation we will extensively dive into the different backward compatibility strategy that can be applied to REST / JSON , SOAP and plain XML APIs and examine the differences.

When your APIs are serving around half a billion transactions per day, providing a gateway to your company's core business, it is very critical to extensively monitor your APIs and be proactive about all production issues. You can not lose your APIs even for a fraction of a minute. This talk covers the challenges of monitoring and how you can develop a robust monitoring approach for the APIS. We will also dive into the journey of transformation of API development into the world of agile, DevOps and containerization - all being seamless in continuing to serve millions of customer transactions.