Foreword

At this point in time, tens of thousands of companies are exploring solutions for how to better design, build, and manage applications with the aim of improving their customer experience and growing their bottom line. The application development domain is vast, yet so elegant and simple, so long as fundamental principles of architecture are understood and adhered to. APIs form an essential principle that if incorporated into application design and architecture will help produce applications that are simple to develop, manage, and evolve. These benefits free organizations to allocate more of their development capacity to improving their user experiences, adding capabilities, optimization of experiences, and innovation of new experiences.

APIs as a concept were discovered, meaning that they exist whether they are consciously accounted for at the time of design, or if they are inadvertently created as a by product of service development. Like doors to a building, APIs can be specific considerations or an afterthought. Any person who has used a building where doors are explicitly designed for the needs of the user's interaction with the building appreciates the elegance and flow of maneuvering into and within the building. Consider how buildings used for different purposes, such as hotels, airports, personal homes, and retail stores, have vastly different use cases for their doors ranging from the main entrance, delivery docks for trucks, gates for airplanes, to the storage of valuables just to name a few examples. Also, consider how doors also play a major role in security ranging from crime prevention, privacy, fire prevention, and more. If one can appreciate the importance of doors in our society, one will realize the importance of API design and API management in the application development domain. For users to have the feeling of elegance when using or managing an application, proper API design and management must be done.

Tooling for API Design and Management has already become very mature, offering many capabilities to help development teams meet their goals in whichever circumstance they find themselves. While there is a continuing evolution in the tooling, which will continue for the time to come, the time to leverage the tooling is today. Thousands of companies, with tens of thousands more on the way, across all industries have already developed API initiatives and have incorporated industry tooling and best practices to launch successful internal and public APIs. For companies that have yet to start an explicit initiative for API Design and Management, the time is now.

This book will provide a specific perspective, using scenarios based on real-life use cases, on how to interpret and be successful with domain-specific concepts such as API first design, microservices-based backend implementation, API testing, monitoring, and more. For companies already well underway, this book will provide complementary information, which can be used to succeed with any industry standard tooling, but will use the Oracle API Platform Cloud Service as an example. Welcome to the API community!

Vikas Anand

Vice President Product Management,

Oracle Corporation