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

Advantages and challenges of building a RESTful API

There are a few advantages, as well as common challenges, when it comes to building RESTful APIs. These advantages and challenges will be explained in detail in the following subsections.

Advantages

The RESTful API style offers significant advantages compared to other styles. Hence, when it comes to building API-based enterprise applications, the REST standard is the most preferred specification in the IT industry.   

The main benefits are as follows:

  • Scalability: This is the most important quality when you're adopting the REST standard. Owing to the separation between the client and the server, the development teams can plan to scale up/out the REST APIs, independent of how the clients will consume it. This concept of separation of concerns, coupled with stateless design, facilitates the development of APIs that are modular in nature. Each of the APIs can be scaled independently, as per requirements...