Issue link: https://axway.uberflip.com/i/1137730
4 axway.com Getting APIs and microservices to work at true enterprise scale API and microservice management solutions contribute to solving a seemingly simple but serious challenge in the modern API-driven enterprise: the pure scale of adoption. Once a specialized form of application integration, APIs and microservices are now appearing in virtually all areas of the application landscape. Packaged applications now ship with ready-to-go APIs. Numerous web- and cloud-based digital services are built with APIs as the only point of potential connection. The majority of new, in-house application development efforts assume API connectivity as well as a functioning or potential microservice architecture. Such widespread use of APIs and microservices creates complexity in the architecture. With applications connected—and regularly reconnected again and again—it's easy to lose track of the points of integration. Nested dependencies can wreak havoc on the performance of connected applications. Microservices skills, once the province of a minority of experts, must now be practiced by a far bigger group of IT professionals. All of this puts a strain on the ability of the enterprise to keep the API - and microservices-based architecture functioning. Moving from isolated teams to organization-wide embrace A management platform contributes to solving the scale problem by making organization-wide API and Microservice use a possibility. With a common user interface, a community, global API catalog and API "Marketplace," the new generation of API management platform is inviting and more usable than its comparatively esoteric predecessors. It facilitates a move from isolated teams supporting APIs to the organization-wide embrace and use of APIs and microservices that are independently versionable, and scalable. Eliminating "wizards" and the "tall enough to ride" phenomenon Microservices skill sets, once rare and arcane, must now become more accessible to a much broader range of people. As a specialty, microservices were a bit nerdy, the domain of "wizards" who could be counted on to perform impressive tricks of development and integration. A microservices project was like an amusement park ride with a "You must be this tall to ride" sign at its gate. As long as the company, organization or team was "tall enough," in skills and organizational terms, they could do the work and establish their microservice strategy with success. This is fine as long as your organization is viewed as a technology innovator like Netflix. However, most enterprises on a budget can't afford the time or the microservices experts that can assemble all the open source components needed. Nor do they generally have the ability to establish the DevOps CI/CD pipeline with ease. Now that these microservices technologies are omnipresent and the benefits widely understood, intuitive management tools can make every company "tall enough" and full of wizards, so to speak.