Explore API Design from a business perspective

Designing, implementing, and maintaining APIs for the web is not just a challenge; for many companies, this is an imperative task. This series will lead the reader through a journey, from identifying business use cases to designing methodologies for the API, addressing implementation challenges, and looking at maintaining public APIs on the web in the long run. There will be interviews with influential people along the way, and even a list of recommended readings for APIs and related topics.

Today, APIs have become the core of every important information technology trend. Applications such as mobile design, cloud computing, the Internet of things, big data, and social networking rely on a web-based interface to connect with their distributed components, providing innovative and disruptive solutions for every business world-wide. Smart Grid technology has changed the shape of the energy industry, and connected car (Connected car) solutions are seen as a key factor in the automated automotive industry, and Amazon has made a big difference in every industry in contact. In all of these examples, the use of APIs is both a catalyst and the main force contributing to this outcome.

Because of the huge impact of the API on business, there are numerous articles about "API opportunities". On the open Internet, the use of APIs as an external channel for innovation and profitability has become a unique business model. Very comprehensive information on this topic can be found in the API Evangelist (evangelist) website created by Kin Lane, Mehdi Medjaoui in a recent post with a concise summary of the language. Then, within the range of API applications across the technology landscape, the open API model only shows the tip of its usefulness. In fact, the main capabilities of the Web API have not been explored from a variety of solutions using API implementations. In this sense, the opportunity of the API itself is a business model.

This article will conduct a comprehensive analysis of the API from a commercial perspective, whether it is open and publicly available. I talk about the importance of trying to use the API to bring you business value, analyzing the types of data that should be used in it, and learning Aamzon and Twilio success stories. Hopefully, this will help you create useful and usable APIs.

Evaluate the business value of the API

The general business value of the API can be evaluated. All from the data, many companies and organizations view their data as a burden, after all, the cost of servers and storage solutions is expensive. But in today's increasingly electronic world, it is clear that data is also a valuable asset. Data provides a variety of valuable customer information that can generate identifiable opportunities and new ways of earning. "Big Data" frenzy is the pursuit of massive data analysis to deal with the chaos of electronic information. The upcoming Internet of Things (IoT) explosion will increase the scale of data exponentially, making it critical for companies to analyze the data correctly.

For a company, whether the data is an asset or a burden depends on the following three areas: data accessibility, accuracy, and applicability. Each Web API provides some degree of availability of some data, while valuable APIs provide accurate data for the company's core business data. This allows the company to achieve an iterative development pattern that I call "data-enabled disruption", which I will explain later in this article. In addition, these three data attributes provide an effective methodology when deciding what data and services should be exposed by the API, and how these APIs are implemented.

data can be applied	does this data contribute to my business goal decision? does this data bring unique value to my business? If I make this data public, can I generate certain opportunities?
data accuracy	What is the current timeliness of data provided? is the source of data reliable? is the data used by the intended user? Is it used for the right purpose?
data accessibility	What data can be obtained programmatically? What are the different ways can get this data? How difficult is it for developers to create applications that use this data? Does the scale of data access meet the needs of customers?

If you validate this methodology from an API perspective, you can combine the three properties of the data into two properties of the API:

1. "Practical API" to provide accurate and appropriate data
2. Available APIs provide accessible data

Obviously, the most valuable API should meet the practical and available two conditions. However, to further define these API properties, let's take a look at the analysis separately.

A Practical API

One of the most common mistakes when developing APIs is to think that all data is useful. There is a widespread yarn: Once you come up with this data, the Magic developers will appear in front of you, they will sprinkle some magical powder, so that your income growth, the emergence of innovative ideas, and open up a variety of business channels. But just using APIs and open data is not enough to achieve these points. It is this "media-as-a-message" idea that has resulted in a number of failed SOA attempts in the area of enterprise consolidation over the past more than 10 years. A mega-enterprise once spent more than $50 million in an attempt to build a project for SOA and private cloud. And when I asked what kind of service they were going to offer, they were speechless at once because they only cared about building the infrastructure. There is no doubt that the project has finally failed.

On the good side, if you can use the right APIs to expose the right data, you can achieve growth in revenue and progress in innovation. Google Maps's use of Google's overwhelming share of API-based services has just filled the gap in the market. Because this service is very convenient, Google can charge it as a commercial product for a substantial fee. Google Maps has become a permanent application on the early iOS platform due to the presence of APIs, and Apple's own alternatives have been quite poor at first, highlighting the value of Google Maps. The development and success of social networking platforms, led by Facebook and Twitter, are also inseparable from the application of APIs, which have facilitated the implementation of their web links and applications on mobile platforms. The practical API has even had a far-reaching impact on the federal election campaign.

Amazon's API Story

As I said at the beginning of the article, the potential for business success from the API is far greater than the ability to open APIs on the surface. Amazon takes full advantage of this potential, in fact, their API is initially used only within the company. The long-term success of the API for Amazon does not find a similar case in any industry. Amazon provides valuable experience to customers using their APIs to help them achieve commercial success with their APIs.

Amazon's first lesson, and the most obvious lesson, is how it designs the API as a building block for products and solutions. Brad Stone, in a book he wrote, devoted a chapter to describing how Amazon developed its base API into its technology carrier. Kin Lane also makes a wonderful summary of how Jeff Bezos (Amazon's CEO) has slowly shifted from stubborn stereotypes to the process of providing Amazon with programmatic access. According to these reports and some other information, product managers must point out the lowest common denominator of business value in their proposals. The technical team then uses the raw data to create the APIs that will provide these business values to other developers, allowing them to continue to create the rest of the entire scenario. The logic behind this is that the growth of these business values can be directly used and can be easily combined for future product development. That's why Amazon Web Services can be released and improved so quickly: Amazon has an API for their infrastructure services to optimize the process of scaling infrastructure capabilities. The process of AWS is to translate these internal functions into external products. As you can see, Amazon not only guarantees that the APIs they provide provide useful data, but goes further, and they reverse this principle to ensure that every piece of data in the solution is delivered by API.

Another example of Amazon's API is how it uses an API-based approach to collect, analyze, improve, and distribute valuable data. When early Amazon also focused on selling online books, Jeff Bezos had a clear idea of Amazon's core values: "We're not profitable by selling, but by helping our customers make purchasing decisions." "He has always maintained the company's operations in line with this core value, resulting in changes in strategic direction, such as the provision of personalized and expanded channels." In fact, from the core values above, it is these applicable, accurate, and accessible data that guides the decision-making of the customer, making Amazon step-by-step towards success, rather than the success of selling online books or other goods. At Amazon, it is the API that keeps data accumulating and improving, a cyclical process that stimulates Amazon's growth. I call this 360-degree cycle the data innovation "data-enabled disruption (DED)", which is my summary of it:

Ded's successful use has enabled Amazon to defeat countless competitors. Because APIs are applied at every step of the entire data lifecycle, Amazon continues to improve the accuracy, applicability, and accessibility of data.

We'll finally learn how Amazon balances the company's tactical output and strategic positioning. Since Jeff Bezos recognized the potential of the World Wide Web and worked out the vision of "Shop for all goods", he was very aware of the importance of this balance. Bezos realized that he had to start with a smaller goal, after analyzing the market, he was in the field of online image sales, and its development time was ripe and the supply chain was ideal. In the subsequent development of the one hand to ensure rapid implementation, on the one hand always do not forget the future of vision design, this parallel development concept has become a deep-rooted purpose of Amazon culture. Each solution will create value for the company and pave the foundation for future development. API-based delivery is an ideal way to implement this principle, as the API not only serves new applications and services, but also provides a foundation for future use cases. This iterative approach to development has facilitated the continued development of the Amazon Business (see note).

Each of the services in the picture corresponds to an external set of APIs, and each set of APIs is based on the already completed API. Any company that intends to expand its business vertically or horizontally can take a serious look at how Amazon is building a useful API: continuously collecting and retrieving available data, using APIs as a common access point for these data, delivering only short-term useful data, and taking into account long-term development plans. As the company's competitiveness to continue to expand.

The importance of APIs and API design available

Although Amazon has made impressive achievements in this area, and the API has played an important role in the company's success, Amazon's API is still not recognized as the best-designed, simplest-to-use API. As the number of APIs has exploded and recognition of the need for APIs has increased, the availability of APIs is the key to success for companies that dominate the industry, even those who are only planning to build innovative services with APIs.

The advent of mobile devices and the trend towards consumerization of it is a comprehensive transformation of traditional enterprise-level application development. In the past, there were ubiquitous distributed layouts of single-function end-hosts, client-server systems, and recently-appearing web. I used to talk about what I call the "layer shedding" phenomenon, moving the business from N-tier Web models to API-centric, mobile-and cloud-first designs. This shift also includes the case of code development moving from Java Enterprise Edition to JavaScript and its derived languages. All of these indicate that there is a new wave of developers who will gradually become the main force in developing new enterprise-class solutions. These developers are used to proactively find out what APIs are available to meet the functionality they need. The current company should anticipate this shift and cater to the needs of a new generation of developers by embracing the availability of APIs.

Let's look at the situation in the telecommunications industry. Over the years, the major telecom giants are deliberately trying to knock down competitors, but also actively launched a variety of cross-network value-added services. The industry has revolutionized over the past 15 years, including the advent of VoIP, the integration of business and operations services, and the revolution in mobile device services. In the process of innovation, API plays an important role. Even in the forefront of traditional telecoms services, these telecoms giants are struggling to benefit from this wave of innovation. And when they tried to work with startups like Parlay X and Oneapi, they had more difficulty than the smaller companies, and Alan Quayle summed up the phenomenon in one of his essays. If these big boys are hard to seize this opportunity, who can do it?

Founded in 2007, Twilio's goal is to provide customers with an easy-to-use voice and text messaging service that is fully hosted in the cloud. They initially planned to build such a platform and realized that the API would be their first business direction. While SMS and VoIP services are useful, they need more than just a few convenient phone services in order to compete with the telecoms giants.

Twilio's key insight is that they have realized that the first customers of the services they provide are not end users of the applications that invoke the API, but the developers who are responsible for developing those applications. They also know that the growth of mobile applications is necessarily the highest. As a result, they have customized a set of metrics to measure the customer's level of satisfaction with the API. In addition to traditional end-user statistics, such as end-to-end API call response times, they also measure the time required for new developers to register the API and set high targets. This set of indicators improves the usability of the API, creating a leading edge for Twilio for the major telecom giants. When application developers choose SMS or VoIP providers for the development of their applications, Twilio's fast-responding lightweight service is clearly superior to the competition. With this practical API, Twilio can confidently charge for the service and make a profit by paying for each API call from the customer. It is precisely because of this practical api,twilio to improve the company's reputation, but also to increase the company's profits.

Industries outside telecommunications are also ready for data innovation. In the case of Ingenie, the insurance industry's start-up company has been innovating on the basis of an actuarial pricing approach, with appropriate penalties for young people aged 16-25. They collect each driver's data through a patented smart device installed in each car, which is then provided with appropriate insurance discounts based on the data. The practical, usable APIs enable Ingenie to revolutionize the data, allowing them to conquer the entire insurance industry like Twilio.

Useful and Usable API guide

In this summary, to ensure the success of the API, there are several steps to achieve:

• Make sure your API is consistent with your company's strategy
• Include accessible, accurate, and applicable data in the API
• Make sure your API is practical and available
• Learn Amazon's way to build a normative culture that iteratively implements the innovation of data
• Learn Twilio ways to create an excellent API developer experience that will make your business more competitive than any other competitor.

As long as you follow this guide, your API will ultimately be a great success for your business and a model for that. Only you can best judge how to provide a useful API for your customers. Also, please read the other articles in this series, which will give you many valuable suggestions for implementing a useful API.

Explore API Design from a business perspective