REST API Notes for 2018/06/07
It was great catching up with area folks at this month's DC API Meetup Group. Gray Brooks, the organizer, consistently puts together a collection of interesting speakers at a great venue, which is no small feat. The next time you drop in at an in-person community event, like the kind listed on webapi.events, be sure to thank the organizer. These are the kind of things that make working in the API community such a rewarding experience.
Now, on to this week's notes!
NEW AND NOTEWORTHY
MAKING MICROSERVICES SERVERLESS
More than just mushing together two of the bigger trends, Yan Cui's article on 'How to Migrate Existing Microservices to Serverless' is a great read. Sometimes these types of pieces get overly hand-wavy, to the point where you begin to wonder whether the author has actually done any of what they're talking about in a production environment. That's not the case here, with regular helpful details and nuance that only come from first hand experience.
Our old friend, correlation Id, makes a brief appearance. Given the usefulness in multiple contexts, I'm surprised there hasn't been an effort to officially add this to a web standard. Course, I don't follow the going-ons of standards bodies that closely. If there is something out there for correlation Id, let me know - hello@matthewreinbold.com.
COMCAST'S JOURNEY FROM MONOLITH TO MICROSERVICES
I love a good software post-mortem. Techtarget has an interview with Tom Hughes, senior director of software and IoT platform engineering at Comcast. Tom describes the challenges they had not only with microservices, but adopting the ambitious, but logical, goal of creating a cloud-agnostic architecture:
"We underestimated the complexity involved with implementing this decision and the impact that it would have on our velocity," Hughes said. "Once we pivoted to an approach focused on a single cloud environment [AWS] for this specific project, we realized the rate of development and advantages to leveraging components native to that environment."
The piece covers a lot of ground. However, I think what the piece reinforces is that microservices are more than an architectural style. To be successful with them, significant cultural changes in how a company approaches CI/CD, testing, hosting, measurement, etc. are necessary.
DEPRECATION STRATEGIES
Phil Sturgeon is currently off biking the Panamerican highway. However, before he left, he dropped a significant cache of knowledge in his discussion on deprecation headers. While we may pretend that our interface designs are perfect bundles of joy at birth, the truth is - sooner or later - they start crapping out. Having strategies to accommodate change is a big deal and this article is a great way to supplement any change process.
MILESTONES
- While it wasn't directly related to APIs, it feels as though Microsoft buying GitHub for $7.5 *billion * is worth mentioning. The open source folks on Twitter had a range of "colorful" reactions, ranging from the comical to the slightly unhinged(and for the folks leaving GitHub for GitLab in protest, I hope you enjoy your Microsoft Azure experience [I kid, I kid - I know GitLab has a self-hosted version and announced earlier this year they were moving to the Google Cloud. They're just not there yet.]). All things even, I enjoyed the summary of the event by Paul Ford the best.
- The Netherlands has made the 3.0 version of the OpenAPI specification the standard for describing all semi, local, and national government REST APIs. Done in the name of interoperability, this is a fantastic experiment to watch. What is the impact of standardized data interfaces on government data? I'd guess we all have our suspicions, but seeing it play out with quantifiable results will be great.
- Code.xyz, a web-based code editor for creating serverless APIs, was launched by Polybit . The launch is accompanied by a $2M investment from Stripe.
WRAPPING UP
Hard to believe that we're half way through 2018 already. I've been pulling together my project list for the second half of the year. There's nothing there that I'm ready to commit to in a public forum quite yet, but I'm excited.
And, on that mysterious tease, it is time to end. Til next time,
Matthew