API Evolution: What's next?

To predict what will happen to the enterprise application landscape next, AINSYS specialists described precisely how application integrations have evolved over the years.

Integration components have been observed to become more and more modular and data model-focused, with a growing emphasis on real-time processing. This progress began in the 1990s with EJBs and continued in the early 2000s with the emergence of Web services and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Finally, we are moving towards domain-specific microservices, providing more efficient and effective integration solutions.

Real-time events

As businesses grow and connect with more consumers, the webs of interactions between their apps and services become ever more intricate. This complexity can lead to all sorts of complex problems, such as key components going offline, tricky scaling issues, and a frustrating lack of flexibility.

But as if that weren’t enough, the pace of technological change and the lightning-fast spread of internet access means that customers now expect rapid-fire responses from the companies they deal with. These changes in business, real life, and technology systems can be seen as events.

An event triggers processing within a system. They can be sorted into three main categories:

• business;
• system;
• technical.

As events happen naturally in a system, capturing and interpreting them as effectively as possible is crucial to ensure their efficient utilization. The key is designing a well-organized system to process these events efficiently.

A recent study by Gartner shows that the value derived from data and events increases as their usage speed accelerates. In other words, the faster a system can process and react to events, the more value it can create. This emphasizes the importance of building systems that can quickly and effectively capture, interpret, and process events.

Businesses and architects aim to boost their efficiency in the race to unlock the true potential of data and events. And what’s helping them succeed in this mission is adopting a groundbreaking technology called Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). This technology revolutionizes various industries by enabling them to process data and events seamlessly and efficiently.

Microservices

Businesses have used the same APIs for years and years, generating monoliths with legacy code that has endured years of collaborative coding, rendering it nearly impossible to restructure due to its ongoing usage and interdependence. As a result, specialists have designed microservices to tackle monoliths’ unreliability.

While many architectural tools are available for developing microservices, including GraphQL and gRPC, REST (Representational state transfer) is the go-to choice for most developers. However, simply choosing REST isn’t enough to ensure that a microservice is well-designed. It must also possess several important architectural features:

• Facilitating flexible integration with new functionality, which can be achieved through loose coupling;
• Allowing for several distributions of data elements, improving the processing efficiency of the service;
• Thirdly, it should implement deferred execution to enhance response time, robustness, and performance;
• Dependable delivery is also essential for robustness in the face of faults and imbalanced speeds;
• Complex and unreliable state in case of failures;
• Slow response time and negative user experience due to complicated orchestration.

However, several issues may arise during the designing process, including duplicating data fields in microservices and managing updates and changes that require careful handling to ensure data consistency across all microservices, the need for microservices to communicate and interact with each other, which requires each microservice to have its own communication stack, as well as testing, debugging, and monitoring the performance of a distributed system of microservices requires proper tools and attention.

Learn more about how your business can smoothly transition from monoliths to microservices.

Event-Driven APIs

Asynchronous interaction, event-driven architecture (EDA), and event-enabling traditional microservices are the answers to the limitations of synchronous microservices.

As more people recognize the significance of events and EDA, architects, and developers are searching for ways to integrate events into microservices. However, the successful adoption of EDA requires a significant shift in mindset and approach from business stakeholders, product owners, and architects. This means moving from a data-centric approach to one that uses events to drive business decisions and logic. Full event-native adoption is essential to fully capitalize on the benefits of events throughout the different stages of the business.

EDAs offer a range of benefits that will transform the way you handle requests and process data:

• Scalability. With event-driven APIs, you can easily handle high volumes of requests by processing events in parallel across multiple subscribers. Your system can scale horizontally, making it a breeze to manage even the most demanding workloads.
• Thanks to real-time data processing, you can respond to events instantly without constantly polling for updates. This leads to faster, more efficient systems that can keep up with even the most rapid-fire changes.
• Event-driven APIs promote decoupled systems, which means that changes in one system won’t necessarily impact the other, allowing for greater independence and flexibility, as each system can evolve at its own pace.
• Enabling dynamic and flexible data flow between systems. Events can be generated and processed by different systems, at different times, and in different ways, giving you unprecedented control and customization over your data processing pipeline.

How to correctly design an EDA

To develop an EDA, avoid mentioned problems, and benefit from EDA’s advantages, you can follow this structure:

There’s always room for improvement and growth. Whether you are adapting to changing processes or discovering new use cases, the key to success is staying ahead of the curve.

By properly managing the lifecycle of your API product, you’ll be able to keep up with the latest trends and technologies, ensuring that your product stays relevant and effective.

To properly control the power of event-driven APIs and unlock real-time events and information for developers and business stakeholders, you must get an accurate picture of your software. By using AINSYS tools, any IT specialist can ensure they make the right decisions for their organization. Contact us to learn more.

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