3Scale Releases 2015 Predictions for the API Industry

SOURCE: 3Scale

2014 was a great year for APIs. There were new technologies, and a lot more reach and relevance as API deployments broadened. More companies launched APIs, those APIs were more robust and useful than ever before and executives in the C-Suite began understanding the importance an API can have for a company and its bottom line. Looking forward into 2015, Steve Willmott, CEO of 3Scale, the leading API management platform, has compiled his list of predictions for the API space in 2015. The year promises to have a lot of new API innovations and uses, combined with the inevitable growing pains of any young industry.

In addition to inevitably “more growth,” he predicts:

1. Web API Design Will become a Premium Tech Skill: API Design is likely to show up more frequently in job recs across many industries. Expect there to be a significant new market for API Design courses, workshops and materials. Hopefully this will lead to more best practice and an evolution of what it means for an API to be “great”.

 2. API Search and Discovery will Heat Up: As the number of APIs increases, it has become hard to find what’s out there – directories and search will become increasingly important. Expect more use of machine readable meta-data formats like APIs.JSON (or any alternatives) to publicize APIs and strong growth for API discovery services like ProgrammableWeb, Mashape, APIs.IO or new ones which come along.

 3. Automated Code Gen and SDKs will Raise the Bar: Love or hate SDKs, automation of integration and code generation have now reached the point where resulting code can be genuinely useful. As such, we expect code generation with descriptions such as Swagger or 3rd party tools such as APIMatic and RestUnited to help more APIs do what leading APIs do and add code for developers to get started more quickly.

4. Security Breaches will be Top of Mind: With multiple high profile Internet security breaches in 2014 (not least Sony in December), risks to online systems are clearly climbing and APIs will need better protection. Along with all their utility, unfortunate done wrong, APIs can also act as a potential new attack vector through which mass amounts of data could leak. Unfortunately this may lead to one or more serious breaches throughout the year and certainly an increase in attempts and threats.

5. API Operations will Become “A Thing”: Building on the previous point and challenges we see articulated by 3scale customers, technical operations for running APIs will become more critical. Ops teams will begin seeing APIs as a first class entity alongside Web and other properties. Needs will run from testing, monitoring, security, alerts, troubleshooting, scaling and general management.

6. Industry Standards or Shared Specifications will Start Getting Early Traction: The increasing proliferation of APIs for similar services that different interfaces is a challenge for everybody. Hopefully the increasing adoption of service description formats, and common patterns such as Hypermedia frameworks, will lead to more sharing of designs and collaboration.

7. The API Event Scene will Grow: 2014 saw a mushrooming of API events and those events go from strength to strength. We expect this trend to continue, but also broaden with some events trending larger and others reaching new geographies as well as becoming sector specific.

8. Realtime and Post Rest APIs: Realtime APIs will continue to proliferate and it will be an interesting year in API that deviate from REST patterns. At scale we’ll likely see more companies adding device centric calls or compiling call results for efficiency on mobile. This does not mean “REST is Dead”, simply that there is pragmatic evolution for new API use cases.

9. IoT will Stretch API Architectures: Internet of Things applications are quickly coming to many consumer products and industrial use cases. APIs are almost always part of the equation. This “APIs on board” trend will lead to interesting challenges for evented systems, web hooks and technical

10. Identity, Privacy and Data Access will be Key: APIs are becoming a means to unify content and functionality delivery across devices. It will become more critical to think carefully about user and app identity in order to both create great experiences and to safeguard security / privacy. We expect movements to continue to try to create decentralized, indie-web style solutions that separate out data and functionality from silos but it’s hard to predict how large players will open up in response.

Overall, 2015 looks like a year in which adoption will continue to grow while there are still a lot of new technical and best practice questions being answered, especially in areas like service descriptions, SDKs, Identity, etc.

The full list of predictions can be seen at: http://www.3scale.net/2015/01/api-predictions-2015/