Video and Slides: Is your API naked?  API Platform and Ops Considerations »

Thanks to all that attended last week's API Best Practices Webinar #5 "Is your API Naked? API Platform and Operations Considerations" (and thanks to our presenters @gbrail and @landlessness). Video and slides are below.

Our next API webinar, "Your API Sucks!  Why developers hang up and how to stop that" with @landlessness and @earth2marsh, is June 14th at 11am PST (sign up here!)

(And you can see all our API best practices webinars to date here)

How is cloud computing related to SOA?  Case study on API Policy and Governance Patterns »

Last week, Scott Metzger of Truecredit.com gave a great case study presentation on how they opened their internal SOA as APIs for partners at the Burton Group Catalyst conference.  Specifically, the different policy and governance patterns.

Scott talks about the factors driving them to identify and implement a separate application agnostic layer for 5 major policy patterns including service access, routing, caching, transformations, and operations. (And more details of their implementation in this video)

Scott Metzger of TrueCredit Catalyst Presentation

Case Study: SaaS API Governance and Management »

Last week, Tim Madewell of Innotas gave a great case study presentation on SaaS API Governance and Management at the Burton Group Catalyst conference.

The key point:  If you provide or use a SaaS API, you have to make sure your SaaS API has the same level of governance as on-premise alternatives.  And if you can nail this - you might have a significant competitive advantage over both your on-premise and SaaS competitors in your vertical.

Tim talks about the evolution of their API becoming an critical part of the service, the importance of governance, and how they operationalized their API.   

SaaS API management and operations »

This week we'll be at the O'Reilly Velocity conference on scalability and operations in San Jose.   On the topic of API operations, below is a case study we did with Tim Madewell of Innotas, providers of on-demand IT Governance -  where he talks about how they operationalize and scale their SaaS API.

Tim talks about the importance of having separation and visibility between front-end and back-end service traffic.  We are seeing this use case more often as more web products are being built off the same API that is opened to customers and partners.  Because your web app is the biggest customer of the API, it's critical to be able to understand and throttle traffic into the back-end to make sure your web app performance isn't compromised by API usage by other clients. 

From a competitive standpoint, Tim makes a great point that it's critical to be able to assure enterprise customers that a SaaS API is as robust as anything their customer could build or buy on-premise - not only from a functional standpoint, but operationally in terms of security, compliance, control and scale.   

For more on this, Dana Gardner did a great podcast on Innotas API management at briefingsdirect.com