Microservices and APIs (short for Application Programming Interfaces) have become almost commonplace in sustainable modern application development. APIs drive microservices (an architectural design that structures an application into small, self-contained, and manageable services/pieces) and they define how a consumer (of the API) can interact with and use the underlying service.
An example of an API service is something like say Twitter where rather than letting a 3rd party developer log directly into the inner workings of Twitter to allow say sending and receiving of Tweets for their external 3rd party application, they will instead create and expose an API which allows very limited and controlled access for that 3rd party app. The API is structured and documented to allow for authentication, extraction (reading) of allowed data, and updating/posting of allowed data. The API acts similarly to how a firewall works for an operating system.
API services are a great way of allowing 3rd party innovation, saving internal IT dev costs especially on reporting data, and also ensuring own client privacy is not breached.
See some options for API tools at
10 Top Open Source API Gateways and Management Tools#
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In this article, we will review 10 open-source API gateways and management solutions for your Linux infrastructure.
