Best Practices API management for DevOps

API is critical in connecting services, applications, and clouds. Now, when the economy is getting tighter, application programming interfaces are changing too. App owners, enterprises, developers and DevOps use and create APIs every day.?

RESTful APIs were most common before GraphQL was introduced. Now, many are switching to this API design in software architecture. Also, API management is now the first important step to automated testing, deployment, and development. What’s changed??

Change in API landscape

Earlier when you had an #API #gateway, that meant you are managing APIs. RESTful APIs follow the HTTP spec with regard to resources and return various HTTP statuses for different API request states. It is done quite slowly compared to GraphQL. Performance and development speed is better when you use #GraphQL.?

Now, the apps have so many APIs sometimes that it became problematic to use RESTful. That’s where DevOps and API management are making a difference. The best practice is to manage the API from creation through testing, deployment, and deprecation/end-of-life. And have skilled DevOps to streamline the processes.?

The ideal situation would be to have an API management system that supports SOAP, SOA, REST, GraphQL, and gRPC. That way any kind of API (that is managed, monitored, and tested)?could be viewed in one place.?

Establish a Connection between DevOps and API?

Management of APIs by DevOps just makes sense with the number of business needs, regulations, and technical needs. Of course, it depends on your company and the types of APIs you use: data APIs, services APIs, public/open APIs, private/internal APIs, etc.

I think API management can be strategically added to CI/CD pipeline. Teams can collaborate and improve before they have to put out fires. The constant checking and monitoring if done manually put a lot of strain on resources. With CI/CD the process becomes automated and less likely to need manual intervention. (A relief to developers truly ??)

What can DevOps do in terms of API management?

1. Monitor API performance: Use monitoring tools to track API performance metrics like response times, error rates, and throughput to identify and troubleshoot issues quickly.

2. Implement API security: Implement authentication and authorization protocols like OAuth or JWT to protect APIs from unauthorized access. It wouldn’t be an overkill to add encryption, and access control mechanisms.?

3. Test APIs continuously: Use automated testing tools like Postman or Newman to test APIs continuously and catch bugs early in the development cycle.

4. Use containerization: Use containerization tools like Docker to package APIs and their dependencies in a standardized way, making it easy to deploy and manage them across different environments. This method is not exactly easy but if you need to manage a large API landscape and the usual methods don’t work, try it.?

5. Follow API design principles: Use API design principles to ensure that APIs are easy to use, maintain, and scale. It’s better to consult on what design principle will better suit your business aims.?

6. Continuously optimize: Continuously optimize API performance and security by monitoring metrics, identifying bottlenecks, and implementing improvements.?

How to make a Collaborative API design?

One of the main tasks of DevOps is to reduce friction between the development and operations teams. So that, the process of buid, test, release is smoother. With the help of collaborative API design, different teams are contributing during the API design phase.?

By involving operations early on in the API design process, development teams can better understand operational requirements and constraints, leading to a more efficient API design. This can be achieved through practices like DevOps workshops, sprint planning, and code reviews.??

To be honest, #DevOps specialists need to be close to the project manager in this role. Getting everyone on board and having a consistent and healthy environment is quite a tough task.?

Why API landscape matters and how to make it better?

Keeping the ecosystem effective and not overcrowded with mismatching APIs, is a challenge. (underestimation of the year) Poorly set up API landscape can lead to security risks, maintenance burden, technical debt, and poor performance. That’s why we need a more standard way of managing them. The best thing we could do now is to follow the best practices of DevOps and add CI/CD pipeline + automation tools.?

It might sound difficult and burdensome but experienced #development teams already do that.

What best practices do you use to manage APIs?