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The universe of possibilities provided by APIs keeps expanding. For many business leaders, they are a permanent asset in their solution architecture landscape. For others, however, it’s still uncharted territory.
For this reason, we teamed up once more with Randy Heffner, one of the world's most prominent software experts, to discuss what is, in fact, a trend in this immense API scenario, generating insights that will help companies to anticipate and stay ahead of the technology curve.
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Heffner's criterion for defining the 6 API trends for 2023 was to choose short-term best practices that are directly based on one or more of the long-term trends he indicated in 2022 - and that are still fully relevant.
The possibility of connecting your API strategy to another software trend was also a crucial factor for the listing. After all, our traditional API Trends goes far beyond insights on API integrations - and far beyond the trend itself.
Each of the 6 trends for 2023 highlighted by Heffner should be followed within the context of your strategy. As he states, "you can build research and testing of it into your plans – but only after you’ve determined its relevance for your specific situation and not because others say it’s new and cool".
Open Banking, Open Insurance, Open Finance, Open Education and so on. Discussions about "Open Everything" are already a reality. In some industries, regulation is just one of the steps, and leaders are already looking beyond what this open universe can provide.
Complex hybrid and multi-cloud scenarios have become the norm. As many as 80% of enterprises use more than one major cloud platform, according to a 2022 survey by Deloitte. Among the survey report’s “Leaders,” nearly half of them use three or four platforms. So it's easy to understand why multi-cloud and hybrid scenarios are becoming more common.
"For API users, it doesn't matter how many different platforms are involved in servicing their API requests. Hiding these details is the goal," warns Randy.
Wherever APIs are - and they are widely spreading - they make it easy to integrate many distributed and disconnected parts into a whole.
"Going forward, the mandate is for each solution context or platform to have APIs as a first-class citizen, with tool chains and implementation guidance to foster API usage", explains the expert.
With the rise of microservices, multi-cloud, and highly automated software delivery tool chains, leaders are extending their success with adaptive API governance, going beyond APIs to encompass a broader spectrum of assets across the software architecture and life cycle.
Key API management features to be leveraged include, according to Heffner:
How to achieve faster delivery speed and operational resilience? The answer is platform engineering, which consolidates software infrastructure design and configuration concerns into platform teams, separate from application development teams.
"Development teams can focus more tightly on their applications, while platform teams handle intricate issues," explains Heffner.
Last but not least, the business efficiency, a hype topic totally related to APIs, can be a pillar that supports both efficiency in hard times and opportunity to invest in good times.
"Rather than merely helping with a point solution, APIs, done right, facilitate changing the solution in the future," points out Randy.
Check out the full insights in the whitepaper. In addition to listing the 6 API trends for 2023, Randy Heffner reviews the best practices mentioned in his 2022 document and wraps up with a collection of specific planning considerations for each of the six near-term trends highlighted above.
Click here and download it for free now.
