API Management – Introduction & Scope

With the onset of digital transformation journeys for enterprises across the world, APIs have become a natural strategy for enterprises to provide access to their products and services.

APIs enable easy communication and integration of various systems that help accomplish enterprise business goals.

What was once asizeable undertaking of building custom code that involved understanding the internals of other systems, building,and configuringthe adapters, has now become an API-based integration that is both easy and familiar for the developer community to integrate with.

It is safe to say that if API is not part of the strategy for the product or a service, the real business value of the product may never be realized.

The wide adoption of APIs may be hugely attributed to the ease and familiarity of APIs within the developer community.

Most of the REST-based features on which APIs are designed, come with the HTTP protocol, which is widely used as the transport protocol with APIs.

Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style for developing web APIs. It defines a set of constraints on how distributed hypermedia systems should be managed for data exchange.

HTTP is an application layer protocol that is built upon the principles of REST for distributed hypermedia systems.

It is the underlying protocol for data communication on the World Wide Web. The implementation of HTTP follows the principles laid out in REST architectural style and becomes a natural choice of transport protocol for any APIs that need to be built for accessibility on the Web.