Book Image

Designing API-First Enterprise Architectures on Azure

By : Subhajit Chatterjee
Book Image

Designing API-First Enterprise Architectures on Azure

By: Subhajit Chatterjee

Overview of this book

API-centric architectures are foundational to delivering omnichannel experiences for an enterprise. With this book, developers will learn techniques to design loosely coupled, cloud-based, business-tier interfaces that can be consumed by a variety of client applications. Using real-world examples and case studies, the book helps you get to grips with the cloudbased design and implementation of reliable and resilient API-centric solutions. Starting with the evolution of enterprise applications, you'll learn how API-based integration architectures drive digital transformation. You'll then learn about the important principles and practices that apply to cloud-based API architectures and advance to exploring the different architecture styles and their implementation in Azure. This book is written from a practitioner's point of view, so you'll discover ideas and practices that have worked successfully in various customer scenarios. By the end of this book, you'll be able to architect, design, deploy, and monetize your API solutions in the Azure cloud while implementing best practices and industry standards.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Section 1: API-Led Architecture in the Digital Economy
4
Section 2: Build Reliable API-Centric Solutions
10
Section 3: Deliver Business Value for a Modern Enterprise

Popular API architecture styles

API developers tend to use one or more API architecture styles based on the business functionality and simplicity in implementation:

Figure 3.3 – Frequently used API styles

The commonly used styles are explained in the next sections.  

The tunneling or RPC style

The tunneling, or Remote Procedure Call (RPCs), style is the oldest architecture style and has been widely used for building API interfaces. The RPC style follows the client-server model, wherein the server exposes a set of endpoints that serve as remote functions:

Figure 3.4 – RPC style

The clients interact with these endpoints using a well-defined message format organized using XML. Both the request body and response output of these APIs are in XML. This style is supported by a wide range of transport and communication standards, such as HTTP, TCP/IP, and JMS. The APIs may use encryption and decryption techniques...