What does it take to get the API as a platform done right?

Platform and APIs are the new way of product design, faster go-to-market, and client-centric meaningful innovation. One way to look at the platform is as a solution connecting publishers with consumers or visa-versa while provided value-added enrichment capabilities built on business processes and data. APIs as part of the platform enables much wider participation and creation of an ecosystem of partners, clients, consumers, and more to enchase the core value proposition per local/niche needs. We are moving towards an API economy built on public APIs exposed by businesses, agencies, and governments. A similar trend is seen with data. Some of the APIs and data sources worth exploring are -?https://www.openbankproject.com/psd2/ ?,?https://www.indiastack.org/ ?,?https://developers.ispirt.in/healthstack/health-repository.html ?,?https://data.gov.in/ ?,?https://datausa.io/ ?,?https://www.usa.gov/statistics ?, and more. As APIs approach to development become prevalent, so becomes the design thinking approach on the solutioning side and non-functional elements like availability, reliability, serviceability, fault tolerance, backward compatibility, etc. on the engineering side.?

Design Thinking?is a method of finding practical and creative solutions to complex problems. It brings together a team of people from diverse fields like engineering, design, and business, to understand customer needs and creatively meet those needs with maximum reusability using proven API integration architecture and design patterns. It walks participants through proven steps of inspiration, problem definition, idea generation, prototyping, review, and feedback. According to Tim Brown, author, and CEO of world-renowned design consultancy IDEO, “design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.” Adopting design thinking can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategies. This approach, which IDEO calls design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. Prototyping is an integral part of Design Thinking and User Experience design in general because it allows us to test our ideas quickly and improve on them in an equally timely fashion. A prototype is a simple experimental model of a proposed solution used to test or validate ideas, design assumptions, and other aspects of its conceptualization quickly and cheaply so that the designers involved can make appropriate refinements or possible changes in direction. API approach makes it easy and quick to create basic working prototypes for user testing and feedback.?

Microservice architecture?is an architectural pattern that structures the solution as a collection of services that are – organized around business capabilities, lossy coupled, and independently deployable, is in trend enabling the concept of intra organization and inter-business collaboration build on the API framework (including API Gateway). Microservice architecture is not a silver bullet that will provide for scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance, but it does provide the basic constructs which engineering team can build upon. Products are built for quality, reliability, scalability, security, fault tolerance, and flexibility from the get-go. While independent modular business-centric capabilities enable speed to market, DevSecOps along with AIOps approach ensures high quality, a secure product with an automated test integrated development and fault-tolerant aided deployment. These premises enable lean and agile development which is so critical and at times the strategic differentiator in today’s fast-changing technology and business landscape.

Lean:?In lean we talk about the voice of the customer. It explains why many of the agile practices work. It offers insight into strategies for improving software processes. Lean principles provide a philosophical foundation for scaling agile approaches. It provides techniques for identifying waste and provides a premise for a pull system. Lean brings to the table, the premise of establishing the voice of the customer along with the speed of moving from demand to delivery.

The key concept of lean thinking is thinking in terms of small batches against monolithic projects. First, complete a small batch of work to gain feedback in terms of value it has created and then do the next batch of work. This premise of a small batch of work was the genesis of agile project management. The problem with Agile is that it mostly focused on the plan and build cycle, but not the final delivery which is when the final value is delivered. Also, we have to have a speed with a direction which requires the creation of a horizontal cross-functional team which DevSecOps propagates.

DevSecOps:?The overall speed or velocity of value creation system – demand (strategic, customer, operation, non-functional), plan, build and run is limited by the bottleneck in the critical path. Not only the bottleneck in the process but resource overburden also has an impact on the delivery speed. So one activity in the overburdened state in the end-to-end flow will slow down the value delivery. Agile takes care of plan and build flow for the value stream, but the run part becomes the bottleneck. This is where DevSecOps comes into the picture. DevSecOps is going back to the lean premise of optimizing the full value stream – demand, plan, build and run as a whole. DevSecOps principles are – culture, automation, lean thinking, measurement, transparency, and sharing. While DevSecOps integrates the end-to-end development to deployment lifecycle, AIOps ensure learning from production deployment to support proactive preventive operation actions and also as a requirement feed into the development cycle.??

Data Analytics and Machine Learning:?It is hard to imagine any modern-day solution or platform without a data fabric and analytics layer. The data fabric layer enables data collection, transformation, management, and control. The Data Analytics layer is where exploration, analytics, model development, test, and deployment happens. Depending on the business and compliance framework data security and governance would get applied across the data fabric and analytics layer. Like application ops AIMLOps encompasses end-to-end data life cycle management from data capture to model development, deployment to operation. Interestingly most of the data process runs on production data which requires a set of capabilities to be deployed in the production environment as part of AIMLOps to support data science and machine learning activities.?

Measurement?and transparency are the start of continuous improvement. While OKR is a great way to measure business and product progress, every aspect of DevSecOps and AIMLOps are measured and improved upon. Release burndown or burnup chart are the metrics to track release progress, sprint over sprint. It shows how much work is done and how much is remaining to be worked upon in the project. It along with a dependency tracker is used to track complex projects and also manage cross-functional dependencies. Release burndown chart and sprint velocity are two basic metrics that every scrum team maintains and tracks. A few additional quality-related metrics like – bug slippage, test coverage code coverage, and others are used by the team and it varies from team to team. In operation data quality, system uptime and its related metrics are tracked and improved daily.?

Conclusion:?API as a platform is a disciplined approach of design thinking, microservice architecture, DevSecOps, AIOps, and AIMLOps.?