InsightaaS: Yesterday’s ATN feature highlighted an infographic that provides commentary on open source licenses and forges – a subject that I described as one of two that are “important but are generally not on the day-to-day radar of IT professionals.” Today’s feature is the ‘other shoe’ in this pair of posts. It comes courtesy of 3Scale, an API management platform supplier, and it looks (unsurprisingly) at trends in APIs.
Like open source, APIs are an issue that is increasingly important to IT management and software developers. If (as I predicted in “The Death of Core Competency“) the real power of cloud will be realized by connecting individual SaaS solutions together to automate processes, departments and entire enterprises, the ability to discover and work with multiple APIs will be a key factor in IT – and business – agility.
In this post, 3Scale’s Steven Willmot offers 10 API preductions for 2015. It’s a thoughtful list, which covers issues that are important to API management (such as search and discovery and API ops), technology trends (greater use of SDKs, more and better standardization), the role that APIs will play in new automation activities (such as IoT), and the issues that will affect API management and use (security, identity and privacy management).As is the case with open source, API-related info may not be daily reading for most IT professionals, but staying current with trends in this area is important to an sound understanding of the software development (and IT operations) landscape.
2014 was a great year for APIs. There were new technologies, and a lot more reach and relevance as API deployments broadened. We just posted theevaluations for our 2014 predictions and there were a few surprises.
Predicting 2015 is even harder since there is so much going on, but here are our thoughts for 2015. Hopefully a few of them will be on the nail.
In addition to inevitably “more growth”, we predict:
- Web API Design Will become a Premium Tech Skill: One of the requests we’ve consistently heard in 2014 is for design help with APIs. But, while there are great resources out there (for example see A Practical Approach to API Design) and we know of more on the way, experience still counts for a great deal and API Design is likely to show up more frequently in job recs across many industries. We also 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”.
- 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…
