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

Understanding RESTful APIs

The term REST is an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer, which is an architectural style for creating web services that comply with a set of rules and constraints. REST only uses a subset of the HTTP protocol standard, so is quite popular among the developer community for building backend services that offer flexibility in the way data (resources) can be accessed.

As we discussed in Chapter 3, Architecture Principles and API Styles, a REST-based architecture system can be visualized as having two parts; namely, the client, who requests the resources, and the server, which has the resources:

Figure 5.1 – REST architecture style

Note

When using REST APIs, different data formats are supported, such as XML, YAML, or any other machine-readable format. However, JSON is the most preferred and commonly used format.

HTTP-based web services that adhere to the REST guidelines are known as RESTful APIs. These APIs use...