One of the defining tech trends of this millennium is companies moving their data and applications to the cloud to cut costs and widen accessibility. AWS, Azure and others have grown exponentially to provide cloud services.
That in turn has led to a change in how software is built. Developers no longer have to build everything from scratch. They can build their apps on top of what’s made available on the cloud.
A masked call to an Ola driver, for example, is enabled by application programming interfaces’s (APIs) connecting to telecom resources on the cloud. API is a code written to protocols that allows disparate systems and applications to talk to one another with minimal intervention.
“Cloud infrastructure has made building APIs and consuming them very easy. We see most companies digitizing their assets and building APIs around them. The goal is to make everything software-driven,” says Abhinav Asthana, co-founder and CEO of API development platform Postman.
This has also fundamentally changed software development. “It went from everyone building everything to seeing how to modularize it,” says Thiyagarajan Maruthavanan, co-founder of SaaS accelerator Upekkha. He likens it to using prefab structures and other materials from multiple entities to build a house. “APIs took off in the last decade because in software engineering, modularity became the key concept.”
TRANSFORMING CODING
It has transformed how developers think about coding. “With APIs, different teams can interact with the same data and logic using multiple programming languages. Even with legacy applications, which require knowledge of old software, it becomes easier to work with developers with different skills,” points out Anand Hrushikesh, senior engineer at Bengaluru-based startup Spektacom.
“If my software has 10 features, I can provide access to specific features to external users who can implement those without needing to understand all the complexities that go in my code,” he says.
The idea of APIs came from the virtualization of hardware and cloud-based infrastructure as a service.
Earlier, to build a photo sharing application, you would need your own data centres, hire engineers and build the back-end software, hire designers and engineers to build the front-end software, points out Maruthavanan.
“This is how it would have been built 10 years ago. But when virtual computing arrived, turning hardware into virtual hardware, people said, ‘Hey, why don’t I modularize app development?’. From modularization came APIs,” says Maruthavanan.
“From monolithic code bases, it went to a microservices architecture,” adds Sahil Kini, co-founder and CEO of Bengaluru-based startup Setu, which provides banking APIs.
As more public APIs became available, a new breed of developers, who may not do much coding, has come up. “There are lots of people who focus on building workflows by just combining APIs. There are lots of integration companies that primarily put public API blocks together,” says Asthana.
The biggest winners in this APIfication are the companies creating APIs that have multitudes of entities worldwide consuming them. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook are the top ones, and they’re all American.
This is where India lags, even if developers and startups here are reaping the benefits of using cool APIs made available on the cloud. This is gathering more momentum as API calls provide access to AI resources.
“In the API economy, it is the API provider that benefits the most. A lot of new applications are getting built on APIs, but most of them don't translate into a business. It’s like the movie business, which looks sexy from the outside, but only a few become superhits and make tons of money,” says Maruthavanan.
PLATFORM MODELS
Among the few notable API makers in India is financial infrastructure startup Setu, whose banking APIs have multiple use cases. Another one is telecom API provider Kaleyra which enables things like the masked call to an Ola driver. Then there’s Postman which has taken advantage of the rise of the API economy in a different way by building a platform to help develop and consume them.
APIfication is the reason more and more businesses are thinking of a platform model connecting disparate entities, sharing data and enabling seamless transactions at scale. Business decision-makers have to be flexible to move from an organization-centric view to the platform-oriented digital environment.
Sumit Chakraberty is a consulting editor with Mint. Write to him at chakraberty@gmail.com
