Scaling Microservices with APIs

Why microservices need API management - From Google Cloud

Notes from the article

"Microservices are typically purpose built for a particular use case. As soon as a microservice is shared outside of the small team that created it—let alone outside the company—developers need to be able to adapt the microservices to be more widely used. When a service is meant to be shared and reused across teams and even outside of a company, it can no longer exist just as a microservice—it should be packaged as an API."

"Modern APIs (RESTful, cached, and secured) can act as a facade for legacy SOAP services and monolithic applications, and securely expose new microservices for consumption. A microservice behind an API can be cleanly replaced without disruption to the applications that rely on the API. Mobile and web app developers can continue to consume an enterprise’s legacy services and be unconcerned with the heterogeneous environment behind the APIs or to any transition from monolith app to microservices."

Apigee Edge - From Google Cloud

Apigee Edge is a full lifecycle API management platform that helps you manage the entire API lifecycle from design through iteration and helps you control the complexity of microservices.

The Netflix API

Engineering Trade-Offs and The Netflix API Re-Architecture - How Netflix transitioned from a monolith to a microservices architecture (in 2016!)

Notes from the article

The Netflix API is the service that handles the (sign-up, discovery and playback) traffic from all devices from all users.

The Netflix API is the “front door” to the Netflix ecosystem of microservices.

As requests come from devices, the API provides the logic of composing calls to all services that are required to construct a response. It gathers whatever information it needs from the backend services, in whatever order needed, formats and filters the data as necessary, and returns the response.

So, at its core, the Netflix API is an orchestration service that exposes coarse grained APIs by composing fined grained functionality provided by the microservices.