API and Microservices

Prof Muliaro Wafula Lecture Slides 1

Application Programing Interface- API
• An Application Programming Interface (API)
are used for exposing defined assets, data, or
services for public consumption.
• An API is a way for services and products to
communicate with each other through a
documented interface.
• APIs allows companies to open up data to
external third-party developers, business
partners and internal departments within
their company.
• An app developer can leverage an API with
ease and invoke it via a web browser, mobile
application, or device.
• Product catalogs, phone listings, insurance
cases, order status, and bank loan rates are a
few of the services exposed via APIs.
Prof Muliaro Wafula Lecture Slides
• Any changes to APIs need to be informed to
the developers using the API as it affects the
applications built on the APIs
• These days companies give controlled access
to their data and services through APIs by:
✓ Giving access to only what the company wants to
provide
✓ Giving access to only who the company chooses
to make the API available
✓ Allowing the integration of some of the
company's function or data with other
applications
✓ Subject to terms and conditions that are agreed
to.
• When data is exposed via a common API, this
allows a single point of maintenance, security,
versioning and control. In this way data can be
exposed consistently across multiple devices.
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REST API

Prof Muliaro Wafula Lecture Slides 3

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Challenges

Prof Muliaro Wafula Lecture Slides 5

 • Applications have been
packaged in a monolithic
fashion – that is a team of
developers constructed one
large application that did
everything required for a
business need.
• Once built, that application
was then deployed multiple
times across a farm of
application servers.
• In contrast, with the
microservices architectural
style, developers
independently build and
package several smaller
applications that each
implement only parts of the
whole application.

Prof Muliaro Wafula Lecture Slides 6

Prof Muliaro Wafula Lecture Slides 7
 • Microservices is an
architecture style, in
which large complex
software applications are
composed of one or
more services.
• Microservice can be
deployed independently
of one another and are
loosely coupled.
• Each of these
microservices focuses on
completing one task only
and does that one task
really well.
• In all cases, that one task
represents a small
business capability

Prof Muliaro Wafula Lecture Slides 8

 • Microservices can be
developed in any
programming language.
• They communicate with
each other using language-
neutral application
programming interfaces
(APIs) such as
Representational State
Transfer (REST).
• Microservices also have a
bounded context. They
don’t need to know
anything about underlying
implementation or
architecture of other
microservices.
Prof Muliaro Wafula Lecture Slides 9
Properties of Microservices
Smaller
➢Microservices means no more monoliths. Monoliths are big, clunky, slow,
and inefficient. We are moving away from a world with 2GB WAR files to a
world populated by many services of 500MB each, containing entire
applications, servers, and necessary operating system components.
➢Microservices are an exercise in integration with all interacting
components being much more loosely coupled.
➢Essentially, the idea of a microservices-based system is to maintain and
secure more small components instead of fewer large components.
➢You remove single points of failure and distribute those points of failure
everywhere

Prof Muliaro Wafula Lecture Slides 10

• Continuous delivery and integration can still be done with monoliths.
However, then you're juggling boulders, not marbles. It's much easier to
recover from dropping a marble than from dropping a boulder.
• The development cycles associated with DevOps lend themselves well to
microservices.
• You are aiming for shorter development cycles that continuously add
functionality, instead of longer development cycles that build a complete
holistic vision at once. This development methodology, known as Agile, is a
fundamental practice responsible for the success of DevOps
• Whether you choose iterative or incremental development, the
combination of microservices, DevOps culture, and Agile planning enables
you to quickly build out an entire infrastructure in a shorter time
• Microservices are built on the notion that if you need to go faster, you just
need to add more resources. By building every service to be independently
scalable, you allow for interaction among components to take advantage of
a pool of resources instead of single component interfaces.

Prof Muliaro Wafula Lecture Slides 11