BBVA API Market
One of the great recent revolutions in technology is data management in the cloud. Not only for large volumes of information, what we know as Big Data, but also in relation to platforms or services for end users, such as a customer or a company’s employee. The result of this effort is embodied in hundreds of tools and features for managing information in the cloud: from office automation like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive to storage of personal images and videos through applications.
The greatest challenge for companies and developers is integrating their own system infrastructure with these cloud-based platforms or services, often with third-party providers, and improving the entire experience deriving from that strategic move. APIs are the real key in all this process. We have already mentioned two giants in the sector: Google and Microsoft. But there are many others, such as Amazon or Salesforce.
Sometimes the IT infrastructure of companies is made up of what is known as legacy systems, in other words, outdated services or platforms that are being used and cannot be replaced easily. In order to make this decision, development teams can follow several paths, to a great extent conditioned by the services or platforms they need to integrate into their own service infrastructure, usually linked to certain providers:
As a company’s services in the cloud grow and, therefore, it starts to feel the need to create a service provider network in the cloud, its need to ensure true operability grows exponentially. Otherwise, it can become too reliant on a single provider. As the different services cannot coexist, the most obvious technical solution is for a single provider to provide all the services. But this obviously has clear risks for the future of the company and for its own business.
Some market players have been making interesting moves for some time to force the entire set of cloud providers to accept a number of requirements that would ensure that the service models could always coexist and thus ensure interoperability. One example is the OpenStack Foundation, which is laying a firm foundation for using services in the private and public clouds with many providers on the market. The standardization work of the OpenStack Foundation goes in two directions:
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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.
