Navendu Pottekkat - APIs for the cloud and API gateways
What is your experience with designing and building APIs?
I'm a maintainer of Apache APSIX—the open source, cloud native API gateway. Formerly, I maintained two Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects.
Through my open source contributions, I have been helping people move to cloud native environments for the past three years.
APIs for cloud native environments are my key focus.
While creating API Designs, implementing and / or consuming and testing them, what challenges have you faced / are facing?
We are in a challenging transition phase to cloud native environments. The benefits of moving to cloud native architectures often shadow its costs in security, scalability, complexity, and monitoring.
As monoliths become microservices, direct client-to-APIs communication means exposing the APIs for each microservice. This means that the API developers need to add functionalities like authentication, rate limiting, traffic control, and monitoring to each microservice.
Moreover, making changes to the API, like splitting or combining services, puts a burden on the consumers, requiring them to update their client applications.
What lessons have you learned with regards to designing and testing APIs?
When moving to the cloud and when you split monoliths to microservices, it is beneficial to use an API gateway. An API gateway will centralize responsibilities including security, scalability, monitoring, and more, making it easy for the API developer to focus on core business needs.
What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
I plan to explore more about the challenges faced by API developers in moving to the cloud and adopting a microservices architecture.
I also want to explore how people see API gateways and whether they use them/are familiar with them.
How do you plan to contribute?
I plan to share my work with Apache APISIX and help people trying to adopt API gateways. I will share some of the best practices in developing modern APIs based on our experience in working with top companies to help them handle large-scale traffic.
Call for Papers CLOSED
Ended on Oct 30 '22 11:59 PM IST
In our experience, having participants write a position paper before coming to the conference leads to better discussion because people have thought about what they want from the conference. Last thing we want is to spend half of the conference time figuring out what you want to figure out.
A Position Paper is a simple paragraph which answers the following questions:
- What's your experience with designing and building APIs?
- While creating API Designs, implementing and / or consuming and testing them, what challenges have you faced / are facing?
- What lessons have you learned with regards to designing and testing APIs?
- What do you plan to learn /explore at this conference?
- How do you plan to contribute?
* Note that the above questions are just pointers, you don't have to answer each one point by point.
