The progression of APIs and microservices

Learn about the evolution timeline of APIs and microservices

Photon Slideshare explains how APIs and microservices evolved into the lynchpin of agile and decentralized enterprise architectures.

Connect with Photon to power great omnichannel experiences with APIs and microservices.

 

The progression of APIs and microservices - Photon Infotech from Photon 

From proprietary, ad hoc solutions (EAI) to open protocols (SOA & API), to increasingly secure microservices, enjoy the four-era history of modular APIs—and the disruptive companies that leveraged their potential.

Late ’90s: Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) services and models

  • Without open protocols, proprietary platforms, and interfaces proliferated
  • Most platforms were integration hubs using “bus” style methods to stitch apps together
  • EAI addressed early integration and transactional challenges by using message-oriented middleware

Mid ’00s: Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and best practices 

  • SOA supports open protocols like SOAP and WSDL for easier integration; EAI platforms begin to adopt them
  • Standardized registries like UDDI automate dynamic discovery of application endpoints for consumers and publishers
  • Economic challenges delay adoption of critical open protocols for security, transactions, and stability Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Best Practices Mid ’00s to Early ’10s
  • EAI platforms start to support much of the same open standards suggested by SOA
  • Larger vendors like Oracle (Fusion) and SAP (PI) support smaller EAI vendors who move to support business process management

Early ’10s: API platforms, SDKs, and API management 

  • REST and JSON become the mobile programming model, the de facto standard to consume back-end data
  • New open protocols like OAuth support security features for browser-based and native applications alike
  • Compared to SOA architecture, this stack proves to be light and agile while maintaining a similar feature set to SOAP/XML standards
  • All three generations of these technologies co-exist today in a comprehensive architecture for omnichannel digital experiences

2015 to today: Microservice architecture, resilience, channel APIs and security

  • The world is moving toward the next generation of HTTP, forging strategies to create small, cross-platform containers that host independent microservices
  • New technologies like Node and Spring work well in this newer model, but advanced strategies like Docker provide isolation for different services 
  • Additional open source projects (like Hysterix for Resilience Architecture and JSON Web Tokens for key management) are filling in other pieces of the puzzle
  • HTTP/2 will supercharge the API economy by providing multi-call payloads in a single connection, a nascent but big move for REST technologies

Connect with Photon to power great omnichannel experiences with APIs and microservices.

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