API Strategy & Practice Conference 2017

"Microservices are great, but they have their challenges. You might start with a few, but over time your system is composed of more and more. You might be using tools like Docker and Kubernetes to build and deploy your services, but that’s just part of the story.

Each service needs to have a suite of features to make sure it works well with other services. Load balancing, routing, tracing, auth, TLS, graceful failures, rate limits, and more. You might need to reimplement these functionalities multiple times in multiple languages in multiple places. A total nightmare.

Istio is a open source system that works to solve these common problems. Istio transparently proxies service traffic and acts as a distributed switchboard, giving you a solid base to build your microservices. In this talk, I’ll go over the motivation behind Istio, and show you how you can use it to help build your system."

"The dirty secret of the microservices movement is the heavy operational burden of service provisioning, discovery and interface specification. For many applications, e.g. those with logically grouped activities or that require single-tenant deployment, microservices are a “bridge too far.” In-place refactoring of monolithic applications with service-oriented architecture presents a 3rd-way between monoliths and microservices. OpenAPI provides the API specification and the supporting tooling ecosystem to define sensible service boundaries at the API-layer, substantially de-risking monolith refactors. We present a “war story”, targeted at software architects and developers, detailing the design and implementation considerations that allowed us to use OpenAPI to “break” our monolithic code-base into sensible services to support our life-sciences partners."

Code reuse is commonly perceived to be an effective means of achieving efficiency. One of the main principles in Microservice Architecture is directly questioning this approach, however, advocating to prioritize "replaceability and upgradeability over reuse". Following in this footsteps we further explore the concept of software reuse, especially in large, enterprise settings and come to some unorthodox conclusions that maybe reuse is actually not the most efficient way, at least not always. To keep things sane, we also suggest some guard rails to avoid chaos, in case you decide to de-prioritize reuse.

Query, Extract, Transform, Persist, Repeat.

How many thousands of times has this workflow been codified? What if it never needs to be written again?

AWE is a method that enables developers to retrieve data via APIs without the need to write API aware code. This method has been shown to reduce development time by at least two orders of magnitude.

This presentation describes a method that enables developers to focus on WHAT they want to retrieve from an API, not HOW to retrieve it. Specifically, we have abstracted out the standard workflow for interacting with an API.

We utilize the API documentation and a document that describes what data items are required by the application. We further analyze the API documentation to “string together” the calls required to retrieve the data items.

Stop the insanity of pedantic codification!!