BBVA API Market
The answer to the question in the title of this article is really simple. What would happen to cloud computing if APIs did not exist? There would be no cloud computing. To be even more clear: Cloud computing today depends almost exclusively on the ability of APIs to connect platforms, services and applications and manage the data that feeds them. And if all those resources are in the cloud, the importance of application development becomes even greater. They are not one more resource for facilitating processes or cutting costs, they are at the core of the entire initiative.
Due to the need of some developers to integrate in the cloud data and services of major companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook or Twitter, these tech giants have been working for some time on improving their APIs, with specific pages for developers and the launch of extensive additional documentation so programmers can make the most of the opportunities afforded by these tools. Structured information in the cloud has become the new hard currency between companies that have applications.
Today there are three major groups of APIs linked to the cloud:
These three types of APIs linked to cloud computing are the basis through which many companies have become technology giants today. Not only have they applied a concept where the user is at the core of all the operations, but the entire process is also geared toward developers. Not the developers in their teams, but those who may want to interact with their platforms and their services to offer value to customers.
In this regard, cloud APIs have become an incredible incentive for companies that clearly position themselves within the Software as a Service (SaaS) framework. In the end, the idea is that we have a number of users who consume data and services in the cloud, offered by a third-party company through its application development interfaces, and which are combined with their business applications. This happens with some of the services provided by the giants Amazon or Salesforce, to give just two interesting examples.
Amazon has several cloud computing APIs that enable it to offer to third-party customers from cloud storage (through Amazon Simple Storage Service or S3) to computational capacity in the cloud entirely modifiable based on the customer’s needs, as it is scalable (through its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 service). EC2 manages all the resources through a control API and the customer just pays for the capacity used. On the other side is Salesforce, which offers several cloud services: an on-demand CMR, marketing services, application creation, products in the Internet of Things market, analytics and business intelligence services…
The second big question about cloud computing APIs is: Which are the companies that need them and why do they turn to providers like Amazon or Salesforce? Many companies show an interest in boosting their growth and volume, and face the need to grow in parallel in terms of infrastructure. But this ambition has two tricky elements:
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Taking a customer through the entire buying process until it is formalized is an arduous journey and one that faces the constant possibility of the customer leaving. However, there are ways to make the buying decision happen if you are given facilities such as agile, secure financing.
In a connected world, APIs are the glue that keeps all the parts that form our day-to-day lives in place. The same way the power of glue depends on the material it is used on and the knowledge of its properties, APIs are only as useful as their documentation allows for.
There are different solutions to monitor the performance of an API, in terms of traffic, quality and speed of the answers it provides. Detecting faults in the code or quantifying the generated revenues are also some of the options offered by these useful tools.
