UPDATED 17:00 EDT / NOVEMBER 16 2017

INFRA

API economy puts Humpty Dumpty IT together again

Mulitcloud environments, on-demand software and “internet of things” edge devices are casting information technology all over the place. How will companies avoid a communication breakdown in the connect-the-tech puzzle? Application program interfaces that request data or services from each other are getting smarter. Can they keep the lines open?

The so-called API economy is changing the way DevOps is done, according to Steve Kenniston (pictured), global Spectrum Storage software business development executive at IBM. Plenty of APIs still can manage only ho-hum binary tasks. But others are working harder so developers don’t have to.

“It’s the iPhone world now. I want to push a button; I want it to work,” Kenniston said during an interview at the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts.

The easy buttons on APIs help out developers but also operations staff, Kenniston told Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. In DevOps use cases, they can translate the language between dev and ops. Communication between these two has historically been fraught with headaches and misunderstandings, Kenniston added. (* Disclosure below.)

Typically, operations people had to learn material outside their comfort zone in order to work with developers. Developers would build an app, pass it to operations, and, almost without fail, it would glitch, bug and freeze both sides into a finger-pointing match, Kenniston explained. Quality APIs that perform clearly defined tasks get everyone on the same page about what applications can do.

“That whole API conversation is now moving away from education, more toward the true fulfillment and building out of these new applications that are making businesses competitive,” he said.

These applications owe their mojo to the data and service combos possible through multiple APIs talking to each other. For example, Google Maps’ API helped Uber Technologies Inc. grow by routing drivers to riders quickly. (Uber is now relying less on Google’s API.) Expedia Affiliate Network’s ubiquitous API is so hot with app developers, it accounts for 90 percent of the company’s $2 billion yearly revenue.

Can APIs teleport edge to cloud?

“APIs, especially when designed well, allow pretty much any one thing to connect to any other thing in a way that eases technical labor,” said Pat Wilbur, chief technology officer at Hologram Inc., as quoted by Lob.com. Wilbur specializes in building security infrastructure for IoT connected devices. Writing time-consuming special programs or software can be side stepped with APIs. Rather than connect two nodes to a third node, an API can simply connect the first two directly together.

The current state of IoT connected devices and infrastructure supporting them is “an absolute disaster,” said Maribel Lopez, founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research LLC. Lopez spoke to the theCUBE recently about artificial intelligence as a possible solution to these and other technology tangles.

Training models with artificial intelligence in the cloud then pushing them to edge devices appears to be the working plan. But the details of the journey from cloud to edge and back are uncertain. Can the network move the data fast enough? Will edge devices have enough intelligence to do some of the lifting in analytics and decision-making? What will patch the potholes on the way?

“What excites me most about APIs is that as this web grows and you add internet of things to it, APIs will weave together that fabric,” Wilbur said.

APIs not only transfer bits of information around a decentralized IT environment. “You can actually take one object or real-world item and have it interact with another real-world item,” Wilbur said. “Physical items can interact with other physical items in the world around us, digitally.”

API stitches still showing

APIs hook up data sets and features between different companies and also within individual companies. This accounts for their rise in popularity with developers and chief information officers.

Surveyed enterprises reported a total of 1,031 internal cloud services in the SmartBear Software 2016 State of APIs Report. Thirty-nine percent of these companies said the services needed better integration.

APIs are becoming an important integrative tool for making IT and business run smoothly, according to a Gartner Inc. report from April. “We already live in an API economy where CIOs must look beyond APIs as technology and instead build their company’s business models, digital strategies and ecosystems on them,” wrote Paolo Malinverno, research vice president at Gartner.

So pile up on mismatching SaaS apps, cloud services and IoT devices like there’s no tomorrow, because APIs? Sounds too good to be true, and for the moment, it is. API hiccups include the prevalence of polling, versus webhooks. An API that polls for data executes attempts on its own, which mostly fail to glean new data. Webhooks are event-driven and only send new data to APIs as it becomes available. The latter process is obviously more efficient. Eighty-two percent of developers prefer webhooks, but only 29 percent of APIs use them, according to the 2017 State of API Integration Report from Cloud Elements Inc.

Authentication also remains a relatively weak point, according to Kin Lane, API evangelist. “Identity, authentication and access management will continue to be the biggest challenge we all face and be the number one area that companies will need to be investing in if they expect to achieve success in their API journey.”

Watch the complete video below:  (* Disclosure: IMB Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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