Mulesoft API-led Architecture

   API-led Architecture   

  • What is API-led approach?
API-led approach is a methodical way to connect data to applications through reusable and purposeful APIs. 
This API-led business model is a new way of thinking how to engage with partners and customers through APIs. In other words, our product is the API, so one must take proper care to design it based on business criteria, deploying, and managing the APIs.
This approach speeds up the app launch and modification cycles, the release of new products to market, makes it easier to secure and manage access, and ultimately enable companies to do more and faster with less.
  • Why a business should adopt API-led over traditional methods?
  • Reusable
    Now a days most APIs are developed based on service oriented. So, it means a single API can be use in different applications (with some little modifications).
    This will help duplication of same functionality and will help for more productivity.

  • Security
    Data protection is more important for any organisation. API-led will help us to decide who can request data from our systems, and how to protect the confidentiality of those responses with security measures such as encryption.

  • Flexible Coupling
    Small changes in legacy system integrated via traditional integration methods can have a wide impact. Which will lead an unexpected and undesirable efforts for an organisation.
    API-led helps us to modify any API at any moment without any business impact. Because ideally an API deals with a limited functionality of a huge product and that can be manage by changing the versions.

  • Performance
    As traditional Integration project allow us to deploy with many functionality and some time it is hard manage the performance due to complex logics and inter connections with other systems.
    API-led helps us to get more clear understanding of an API’s functionality and that also have limited functionality. Which helps a product owner to prepare and deploy an most usable APIs with more tuning.

  • Layers in API-led Architecture

In the MuleSoft integration space, preparing an API-led integration architecture is divided into 3 layers. 
  • The top most layer is called the Experience Layer which enables users to interact with an IT ecosystem of a business.
  • The middle layer is called the Process Layer, which pulls data from bottom layer(System Layer), applies business logic to process the data and pushes the data in any desired format asked by the top layer(Experience Layer).
  • The bottom most layer is called the System Layer, which houses the core systems in an IT ecosystem. Which we can treat root API of the API-led ecosystem
Experience APIs
Experience APIs are simple. This API is exposed to out side world to use in mobile apps or Web Apps.
Experience APIs are the means by which data can be reconfigured easily to meet the needs of multiple audiences. Also, we can remove the unnecessary methods and expose only the necessary methods in Experience APIs in a simple way. So, to meet a wide range of clients that accept data in diverse formats, the Experience APIs do this rapidly, decreasing the time to market.
The Experience APIs are the final products of an organization in the API-led connectivity approach. Where organisation should enable multiple layers of security policy to make a product more secured.
Process APIs
Common business logic can be shared across the organization. For example, if an organization already has the purchase order process API implemented, it can be reused whenever necessary.
Process APIs feed in the request coming from Experience Layer and pass that to System Layer, without any need of interfering with the legacy systems.
The Process APIs should be held privately inside the organization as per recommendation and should not be exposed for public use.
In some use cases, the process layer is also not necessary. If a user request doesn’t need any complex information or no need of any transformations of data. Then there will be less role for process layers. In those cases we can avoid create an unnecessary process API.
System APIs
We can say System Apis are hearts of any API-led approach. As these API directly interest with backend systems and in response they provide the sensitive data of an organisation. And these APIs will be called by many intermediate APIs.
These type of APIs are the ones enabling loose-coupling by providing a platform to access systems of record, and exposing data into each record in a canonical format. This avoids any need of interfering with an already complex IT ecosystem present in the business.
Once it build, many intermediate APIs will use to get the system data. So, these API should have better performance with applied security policies.
  • Conclusion
An API-led approach helps an organisation in terms of time and budget. But, that also matter how many re-usable APIs the organisation produce.
Before Proceeding and starts work on this approach the central IT team of an organisation has to identify the most re-usable functionalities of an existing system and then prepare the architectures with API-led approach.
If you got some knowledge about API-led Architecture, please follow with me in next topic to know about Mule API: Experience, Process, System.

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