API Design / Architecture
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
PRO Workshop (API): Autogenerate your database schema and OData endpoints using English with Pine.js
In this talk, we would like to enable API developers with a sophisticated rules-driven API engine that enables you to define rules in a structured subset of English.
The talk gives an introduction to the open source project Pine.js which is the core backend API in balena. The balena cloud stack serves millions of OData requests to more than half a million globally distributed IoT devices and thousands of IoT device fleet managers every day.
Pine.js lets developers define and model your business relations in structured and human readable text format. Using Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) you can easily define entities, entity quantities, rules and relationships and Pine.js will automatically generate the underlying data definition language (DDL) and data query language (DQL) queries and executed them on a SQL database. Finally, Pine.js provides automatically all the OData API endpoints.
Pine.js uses an intermediate abstract SQL format and implements concepts to
automatically resolve m:n relationships to two 1:n relationships with helper tables
parse OData requests and translate them into an abstract SQL intermediate format
translate defined business rules and validations into abstract SQL format
resolve permissions into abstract SQL
All abstract SQL statements are combined into one query to the database and executed in one transaction.
PRO Workshop (API): The BFFs and BAEs of API Development
Building APIs that support multiple user experiences in a complex domain often means using microservices — but while microservices are great for developing, they can be more challenging for your API users and for cross-platform integrations. This is how we use BFFs (Backend-For-Frontend) and BAEs (Backend-Async-Events) at Jetty to alleviate this problem
PRO Workshop (API): What You Need to Know Before Launching Your API
APIs are everywhere. It doesn't matter whether you're building a CRM, a chat platform, or an e-commerce product, your customers will want an API. It's no wonder, as APIs are powerful and enable integrations, automations (both code and no-code), and a variety of other use-cases. In fact, APIs are so useful, that there are now many examples of successful API-only products.
Building an API product, however, comes with its own unique set of challenges, which unlike their UI-driven counterparts, are much harder to fix once done wrong. In a world where developer experience is king, and security issues are rampant, getting any of these wrong may mean the life or death of your product.
In this talk Tom will cover the main things you need to consider when building an API product, covering topics such as high-availability, API design, SDKs, security, and compliance. Tom will draw examples from his experience building a successful API business, and the experiences of fellow founders of API driven products and companies.
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
PRO TALK (API): The Evolving Developer Lifecycle: Best practices for API Builders and Consumers
The API industry is undergoing tremendous changes - driven by a generational shift in the technologies powering APIs and a transformation in enterprise buying patterns. While APIs have been around for a while, the way they look, work, operate and are consumed is changing rapidly. This change challenges current design patterns and developer tools and necessitates creating a more contextual approach to API development.
In his talk, Iddo examines the evolution of the API development lifecycle and the current best practices engineered to support API builders and consumers. The speaker will examine the key technologies required to build, consume, and collaborate on APIs across the entire software development lifecycle.
OPEN TALK (API): Bring your .NET APIs to AWS
APIs are the backbone of many services we all know and love, and when it comes to hosting those APIs, AWS is a great option. When building APIs with .NET on AWS, there are a plentiful amount of options, ranging from the tried-and-true Web API running on Elastic Beanstalk to running highly scalable event driven functions with AWS Lambda. Let us spend some time during this session talking about building APIs on .NET and running them in AWS.
PRO TALK (API): Navigating the Murky Waters of API-First
Everyone is jumping on the API-first bandwagon. For most organizations, an API-first approach is the key to scaling software development. But the journey to API-first is not always smooth sailing.
In 2022, I interviewed five well-known organizations for a sneak peek at how they implemented an API-first workflow among their teams. We’ll uncover why they began their transition, their biggest hurdles, and what is next on their roadmap. Learn from these shared experiences and recommendations to pave the way in your own API-first journeys. This is a session about managing organizational change.
OPEN TALK (API): Creating Profitable Revenue Streams with API Monetization and Analytics
In this talk, we’ll break down two areas of API strategy: API analytics and API monetization.
API analytics are valuable for multiple stakeholders, including product owners, customer success, marketing, and sales. We’ll examine how to get the right data to make informed decisions, outgrow competitors and scale your product.
We’ll also show how teams can use API insights to manage service levels, establish controls, set up security policies, and analyze trends. These analytics not only solve real-world business problems that have a significant impact on organizations, but also help establish a profitable monetization strategy.
A successful API monetization strategy centers around providing true value to paying consumers. API monetization models vary — from pay-as-you-go to monthly/annual billing to “bucket” purchases of API transactions to be consumed over time. We’ll discuss how to create monetizations to deliver high-quality, consistent value to your API users.
**TWO lucky audience members will WIN a PATAGONIA Refugio Daypack ($100 value each) at the end of this presentation! (will be shipped to them after the event)
PRO TALK (API): A New Architecture for APIs
APIs are great. However, API architectures have not significantly evolved. With GraphQL, designed for stitching data together, a new way of forming a graph of graphs is emerging. This architecture leads to a simpler design, better performance, simpler governance and graceful migration to the cloud. It is the way forward.
I will be drawing from my over a decade of experience as the CTO of Apigee, and seeing the impact of GraphQL, I will demonstrate how evolving your API architecture with a layer of GraphQL leads to leveraging your years of REST investment into a more flexible future proof architecture.
PRO TALK (API): Modern API Design
Design principles for modeling API contract. Best practices for API security. How to address scaling challenges like latency, fault tolerance and throughput. When to use rest, gRPC or GraphqL.
Thursday, October 27, 2022
PRO Workshop (API): Horror Stories From Other People’s APIs
In this talk, I'll share my experiences from the past year working primarily on integrations with other people’s APIs. I'll explore some “pearls” that I found and alternatives that would have made my journey a little bit easier.
PRO TALK (API): tl;dr: Shifting API Standards Left
When Marsh McLennan established a core APIs team in April of 2021, one of the first priorities was to create a set of API standards for the organization. But after blending together industry exemplars, RFCs, internal best practices and the occasional meme or two, the forty-six page document that resulted didn’t lead to the API revolution we’d expected. Focusing on closely integrating the standards with OpenAPI specification led to increased adoption across the internal developer community. Come and learn how the team used the OpenAPI Specification to drive standards compliance, improve collaboration and allow for easy maintenance and iteration of the standards over time.
PRO TALK (API): Enabling Developers to Get More Done
Are you blocked by manual processes, inefficiencies, and knowledge silos? Are developers happy or frustrated? Join me and we’ll explore some of the ways you can enable developers to do their best work and improve the developer experience through a focus on tools, processes, and collaboration.
With the increased cloud adoption, smaller autonomous development teams, and microservices we need a way to ensure consistency and productivity. In this talk we’ll explore topics like: boilerplate templates, development environments, CI/CD, code reviews, and effective documentation.
If you’re a developer trying to improve your work day-to-day or an engineering leader trying to empower your teams, this talk has something for you.
Tuesday, November 1, 2022
[#VIRTUAL] PRO Workshop (API): Geo-Distributed GraphQL: Building a Scalable and Resilient API Layer
Join on Hopin
You can provision a cloud native GraphQL API layer and start serving applications within minutes. However, readying this layer for production workloads has its challenges. For starters, what if the number of requests grows 2x, 10x, or 100x? Or, what if the data volume goes from 10GB to 100GB and then 1TB? And what if a cloud availability zone that hosts the API layer experiences outages? Lastly, what if your API layer needs to serve user requests with low latency across distant countries and continents.
Join this hands-on session where we’ll build a geo-distributed GraphQL API layer that tolerates major cloud outages, serves user requests with low latency regardless of whereabouts, and easily complies with data residency requirements when expanding to new territories.
[#VIRTUAL] PRO Workshop (API): Going Real Time with Live Queries and Subscription
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Graphql live queries and subscriptions have a strong case while thinking about creating real time web apps. While both approaches converge to trying to keep the client state in sync with the server, they differ in ways in which they are implemented and give rise to new patterns altogether. By understanding how they behave under the hood, we can decide the best approach based on our use case.
The session will focus on solving problems while designing architecture of real time applications. We’ll talk about some common architectures developers follow while designing resilient RTA apps. When starting to bring Real time use cases discussion of any app, there are certain challenges developers face while using the javascript ecosystem. Graphql, while already boosting application performance and development time can solve challenges pertaining to RTA apps out of box. Why listening to data changes in live queries could make more sense for graphql clients than listening for events in graphql subscriptions. We'll compare pros and cons of these approaches and talk about solutions where we might need a combination of both.
[#VIRTUAL] PRO Workshop (API): Autogenerate your database schema and OData endpoints using English with Pine.js
Join on HopinIn this talk, we would like to enable API developers with a sophisticated rules-driven API engine that enables you to define rules in a structured subset of English.
The talk gives an introduction to the open source project Pine.js which is the core backend API in balena. The balena cloud stack serves millions of OData requests to more than half a million globally distributed IoT devices and thousands of IoT device fleet managers every day.
Pine.js lets developers define and model your business relations in structured and human readable text format. Using Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) you can easily define entities, entity quantities, rules and relationships and Pine.js will automatically generate the underlying data definition language (DDL) and data query language (DQL) queries and executed them on a SQL database. Finally, Pine.js provides automatically all the OData API endpoints.
Pine.js uses an intermediate abstract SQL format and implements concepts to
automatically resolve m:n relationships to two 1:n relationships with helper tables
parse OData requests and translate them into an abstract SQL intermediate format
translate defined business rules and validations into abstract SQL format
resolve permissions into abstract SQL
All abstract SQL statements are combined into one query to the database and executed in one transaction.
[#VIRTUAL] PRO Workshop (API): The BFFs and BAEs of API Development
Join on HopinBuilding APIs that support multiple user experiences in a complex domain often means using microservices — but while microservices are great for developing, they can be more challenging for your API users and for cross-platform integrations. This is how we use BFFs (Backend-For-Frontend) and BAEs (Backend-Async-Events) at Jetty to alleviate this problem
[#VIRTUAL] PRO Workshop (API): What You Need to Know Before Launching Your API
Join on HopinAPIs are everywhere. It doesn't matter whether you're building a CRM, a chat platform, or an e-commerce product, your customers will want an API. It's no wonder, as APIs are powerful and enable integrations, automations (both code and no-code), and a variety of other use-cases. In fact, APIs are so useful, that there are now many examples of successful API-only products.
Building an API product, however, comes with its own unique set of challenges, which unlike their UI-driven counterparts, are much harder to fix once done wrong. In a world where developer experience is king, and security issues are rampant, getting any of these wrong may mean the life or death of your product.
In this talk Tom will cover the main things you need to consider when building an API product, covering topics such as high-availability, API design, SDKs, security, and compliance. Tom will draw examples from his experience building a successful API business, and the experiences of fellow founders of API driven products and companies.
Wednesday, November 2, 2022
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): Building APIs for Modern Developers
Join on Hopin
APIs have changed the way developers build their applications and now it's time that developers change their APIs so that they are fit for every kind of developer be it a novice developer or a person starting with their development journey.
In my talk I would like to go over how to design your APIs so that they are more intuitive and aligned with the end developer needs. I would also like to cover some best practices when it comes to architecting and documenting the APIs to offer the best developer experience.
[#VIRTUAL] OPEN TALK (API): API Security 101: Top API Vulnerabilities and How to Address Them
Join on Hopin
Recently, APIs have become the main attack vector for applications. APIs are so interesting to attackers because they expose valuable data and business logic to clients. Traditional security approaches fail to address these issues. In this workshop, we reveal the most common vulnerabilities found in APIs, talk about recent API breaches, uncover how to detect and subsequently remediate them, and how to put in place secure foundations that start at the design phase.By participating to this workshop, participants will:
- Know all about the OWASP API Top10 classification and the unique nature of API vulnerabilities
- Understand the coding or design mistakes which lead to those vulnerabilities
- Appreciate the value of automating API Testing and "thinking like a hacker”
- Learn practical approaches for API vulnerability remediation
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): The Evolving Developer Lifecycle: Best practices for API Builders and Consumers
Join on HopinThe API industry is undergoing tremendous changes - driven by a generational shift in the technologies powering APIs and a transformation in enterprise buying patterns. While APIs have been around for a while, the way they look, work, operate and are consumed is changing rapidly. This change challenges current design patterns and developer tools and necessitates creating a more contextual approach to API development.
In his talk, Iddo examines the evolution of the API development lifecycle and the current best practices engineered to support API builders and consumers. The speaker will examine the key technologies required to build, consume, and collaborate on APIs across the entire software development lifecycle.
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): Gittified and Powered-up API Docs
Join on Hopin
If you build a microwave, a specification tells how that microwave works; it includes the most important details and perhaps a list of requirements that the end product should fulfill. Once the microwave gets built, the user’s manual shows how to operate and maintain it. In a similar way, you need a specification when building an API.
An API description document, also known as API specification, is a technical document that tells how a system or program works, and shows a consumer how to work with the API. The API documentation shows how to use an API, and it will typically include a technical reference as well as functional guides for how to interact with the API across various use cases.
Web APIs have been around for almost 20 years, but in the last few years the API-first concept has gained traction among teams. An API-first approach means that for any software development project, its APIs are treated as "first class citizens”, and these “citizens” need to have good documents.
Besides generating code from an API specification file, it is also possible to generate and publish its web documentation automatically using the GitHub ecosystem and other open-source tools.
[#VIRTUAL] OPEN TALK (API): The Right Data at the Right Time: Hyper-Personalized Real-Time Data at Internet Scale
Join on Hopin
As companies everywhere move to and create new applications in the cloud, the ability to deliver personalized real-time experiences is no longer a “nice-to-have” – it’s a competitive necessity for every digital service. However, with new experiences come new challenges, especially when handling high volume data for real-time delivery.
This talk will cover the ways in which traditional methods of data distribution must transition to innovative event-driven architectures, and we will walk through examples of how data wrangling-at-the-edge augments traditional stream processing to assure efficient delivery of hyper-personalized data at Internet scale.
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): API Experience – Good Design for Better and Successful APIs That Engage with Your Customers
Join on Hopin
Everyone is talking about APIs. They are seen as a panacea in the age of digitization. But very few of them are really directly understandable, because APIs are usually created on the basis of a data model or the CRUD paradigm. To provide a successful API, much more is needed. And it is exactly this "more" that I would like to address in my presentation. To this end, we need to find answers to various questions.
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): APIs with Bounded Contexts: Modelling Apis with Domain-Driven Design
Join on Hopin
APIs have become one of the cornerstones of digital transformations. As more and more businesses open up their APIs for public consumption, the concept of developer experience becomes crucial for the successful rollout of the APIs. Good developer experience with APIs depends on good principles of API governance, API management, and API design.
In this presentation, we explain how the principles of domain-driven design help us design APIs that are easier to understand and to consume. APIs are not just an HTTP interface to a database, and we’ll see how to use DDD to define the domain of an API and to model its resources. We’ll use strategic design to narrow down the scope of an API, and to avoid mixing properties from different domains. We’ll also discuss various heuristics that we can use to translate domain models and actions into the more restricted representational capabilities of REST APIs and CRUD operations.
The result of this exercise will be a well-structured API with consistent paths and resources that developers will love to use to and to build integrations with.
[#VIRTUAL] OPEN TALK (API): Bring your .NET APIs to AWS
Join on HopinAPIs are the backbone of many services we all know and love, and when it comes to hosting those APIs, AWS is a great option. When building APIs with .NET on AWS, there are a plentiful amount of options, ranging from the tried-and-true Web API running on Elastic Beanstalk to running highly scalable event driven functions with AWS Lambda. Let us spend some time during this session talking about building APIs on .NET and running them in AWS.
[#VIRTUAL] OPEN TALK (API): Enabling Untapped Use Cases - Edge, Memory-Constrained, and Server-Side
Join on Hopin
Many use cases we see today for processing natural language happen in a handful of languages. The prominent ones are Javascript, Python, and Swift/Java (with some Kotlin). Why? Javascript because it naturally integrates with Communication Platforms as a Service. Python because it's foundational in many Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence projects. Finally, Swift/Java because there are more mobile devices than anything else.
This conference is about APIs, but an integral and equally important topic is how we interact with those APIs. I'm talking about Software Development Kits (SDK), which are essential projects that consume APIs and become helpful abstractions that enable developers to build quickly.
This talk is about doing or, more specifically, not doing what's expected. It's about doing something different. The focus of this talk is that providing an SDK in an atypical language within a given ecosystem will allow users to build projects and applications in untapped neighboring communities.
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): Navigating the Murky Waters of API-First
Join on HopinEveryone is jumping on the API-first bandwagon. For most organizations, an API-first approach is the key to scaling software development. But the journey to API-first is not always smooth sailing.
In 2022, I interviewed five well-known organizations for a sneak peek at how they implemented an API-first workflow among their teams. We’ll uncover why they began their transition, their biggest hurdles, and what is next on their roadmap. Learn from these shared experiences and recommendations to pave the way in your own API-first journeys. This is a session about managing organizational change.
[#VIRTUAL] OPEN TALK (API): Creating Profitable Revenue Streams with API Monetization and Analytics
Join on HopinIn this talk, we’ll break down two areas of API strategy: API analytics and API monetization.
API analytics are valuable for multiple stakeholders, including product owners, customer success, marketing, and sales. We’ll examine how to get the right data to make informed decisions, outgrow competitors and scale your product.
We’ll also show how teams can use API insights to manage service levels, establish controls, set up security policies, and analyze trends. These analytics not only solve real-world business problems that have a significant impact on organizations, but also help establish a profitable monetization strategy.
A successful API monetization strategy centers around providing true value to paying consumers. API monetization models vary — from pay-as-you-go to monthly/annual billing to “bucket” purchases of API transactions to be consumed over time. We’ll discuss how to create monetizations to deliver high-quality, consistent value to your API users.
**TWO lucky audience members will WIN a PATAGONIA Refugio Daypack ($100 value each) at the end of this presentation! (will be shipped to them after the event)
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): A New Architecture for APIs
Join on HopinAPIs are great. However, API architectures have not significantly evolved. With GraphQL, designed for stitching data together, a new way of forming a graph of graphs is emerging. This architecture leads to a simpler design, better performance, simpler governance and graceful migration to the cloud. It is the way forward.
I will be drawing from my over a decade of experience as the CTO of Apigee, and seeing the impact of GraphQL, I will demonstrate how evolving your API architecture with a layer of GraphQL leads to leveraging your years of REST investment into a more flexible future proof architecture.
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): Modern API Design
Join on HopinDesign principles for modeling API contract. Best practices for API security. How to address scaling challenges like latency, fault tolerance and throughput. When to use rest, gRPC or GraphqL.
Thursday, November 3, 2022
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): Build Resilient Applications Using Orchestration
Join on Hopin
As we move towards an exciting future of more distributed systems, we are bound to encounter microservices written in different languages and infrastructures.
The resiliency of different applications only makes sense if they come together beautifully to create one invincible application.
In this session, we will talk about how companies like Netflix, Tesla, etc. used orchestration to build robust and scalable applications that inspire innovation.
[#VIRTUAL] OPEN TALK (API): Building an API Monetization Stack
Join on Hopin
Have APIs that you want to use to build revenue? Currently experiencing headaches from existing monetized APIs? Regardless, chances are that you have API resources that others are willing to pay for. The toughest part? Figuring out how to build the right stack for seamless and easy API monetization. In this talk, we will discuss the components of a technology stack that are required when trying to monetize your APIs.
We will cover how to choose a billing provider, API management's role in monetization, and how to bring it all together in an end-to-end solution. By the end of this talk, listeners will have a better understanding of exactly what it takes to build a robust monetization solution for their APIs.
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): tl;dr: Shifting API Standards Left
Join on HopinWhen Marsh McLennan established a core APIs team in April of 2021, one of the first priorities was to create a set of API standards for the organization. But after blending together industry exemplars, RFCs, internal best practices and the occasional meme or two, the forty-six page document that resulted didn’t lead to the API revolution we’d expected. Focusing on closely integrating the standards with OpenAPI specification led to increased adoption across the internal developer community. Come and learn how the team used the OpenAPI Specification to drive standards compliance, improve collaboration and allow for easy maintenance and iteration of the standards over time.
[#VIRTUAL] PRO TALK (API): Enabling Developers to Get More Done
Join on HopinAre you blocked by manual processes, inefficiencies, and knowledge silos? Are developers happy or frustrated? Join me and we’ll explore some of the ways you can enable developers to do their best work and improve the developer experience through a focus on tools, processes, and collaboration.
With the increased cloud adoption, smaller autonomous development teams, and microservices we need a way to ensure consistency and productivity. In this talk we’ll explore topics like: boilerplate templates, development environments, CI/CD, code reviews, and effective documentation.
If you’re a developer trying to improve your work day-to-day or an engineering leader trying to empower your teams, this talk has something for you.