API-Consumption compressed (1)
- 1. The Defini)ve Guide For Building An Enterprise API Consump)on Strategy
- 2. • Iden&fy if your APIs’ users are able to easily access the APIs you’ve created to build what they need • Iden&fy if your APIs are being used to their maximum poten&al • Put in place benchmarks to measure your API performance Introduc)on What’s an API consump&on strategy and why should you have one? Every API strategy is only par&ally complete unless it is complemented by an API consump&on strategy. An API consump&on strategy should be put in place to help you: An API consump&on strategy is essen&ally a strategy to measure the value APIs are providing to your company and create a plan to maximize that value. This whitepaper will help you create a highly effec&ve yet simple API consump&on strategy in 4 easy steps: #1 #2 #3 #4 Iden&fy your APIs’ “customers” Design for implementa&on simplicity Receiving and ac&ng on feedback Measure your APIs’ KPIs
- 3. Step 1: Iden+fy your APIs’ “customers” Your APIs’ consumers are arguably the most important stakeholders of your en;re API ecosystem. The first step to crea;ng an effec;ve API consump;on strategy is to really iden;fy who the consumers for your API are. You need to analyze which one(s) of these forms your API consumer base: INTERNAL DEVELOPERS Sales ops team, Marke;ng ops team, Business ops team, System admins EXTERNAL PARTNER DEVELOPERS Affiliates, business partners conduc;ng transac;ons EXTERNAL PUBLIC USERS Developers using your data to build custom analysis, apps We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a liOle bit beOer. - Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com, Inc. The target audience should be the single biggest influence on your API design” - Daniel Jacobson, VP Engineering, NeYlix
- 4. Once you’re done iden-fying your consumers, you can then start diving a li8le deeper into improving your offering.How you can serve each of these customers be8er, drive loyalty amongst your consumers, and keep them engaged? You can do this by asking yourself ques6ons like: What value are your APIs currently crea6ng for your API consumers: • Are your APIs helping your partners develop faster? • Are you helping developers get access to proprietary data? • Are you enabling your API consumers in execu-ng business transac-ons? Ideate on what you can do to create more value for each set of API consumers: • Can you make your APIs easier to integrate for a par-cular set of consumers? • Do some consumers need more data which you can you provide access to? • Can you make your APIs more exhaus-ve by exposing addi-onal services? • Can you enable even more business transac-ons through new APIs? Your answers to these ques-ons will enable you to create the best developer experience for your API consumers. You will be able to do things like provide your developers with the most relevant examples of API use and create more exhaus-ve documenta-on sui-ng everyone’s needs. This enhanced developer experience will help drive loyalty amongst your API consumer base.
- 5. Step 2: Design for implementa3on simplicity The end goal for most API creators is to get the maximum number of addressable developers to use the APIs created. One of the most important things to do once your APIs are ready is to evaluate how easy it is for developers to use them. The less resistance developers face in using your APIs, the higher adop?on rates are amongst the total addressable developer base. You can lower this fric?on to adop?on by making the APIs easier to use. A few things to consider making your APIs easier to use are: • Developing a comprehensive API design • Reducing onboarding ?me for new developers/partners
- 6. Developing a comprehensive API design: Your APIs should try to provide access to as many services on your system as you can. Crea9ng an exhaus9ve API design lets developers have access to everything they need. This ensures that no developers resist ge=ng on your pla>orm because an API that they need to complete a task isn’t available. If your business partners use your APIs to streamline informa9on exchange, one of your big compe99ve advantages can be to enable minimal manual interven9on. If your partners can execute most of their business transac9ons without having to manually enter order data, they’re more likely to con9nue working with you as an important strategic partner. Though, being comprehensive doesn’t mean being complex. Your APIs should con9nue to be simple. Your API design mantra should always be to keep it simple. For example, as your APIs get more complicated, the number of HTTP response codes need not go up as they might add complexity or break exis9ng integra9ons.
- 7. Reducing onboarding .me for new developers/partners: If your APIs are complicated to use, it could take new developers/partners too long to start using your APIs. You don’t want a situa>on where developers get turned away because it takes weeks to get started with even the most basic API calls. You can easily avoid this from happening using a few easy ideas: • Developing libraries/SDKs - Libraries and SDKs are a developer’s best friend when it comes to integra>ng complex APIs. Crea>ng and maintaining these items is a one >me effort at your end which will benefit all your API consumers to integrate much more easily • Sample code - This is one of the most accessed resources by developers which takes the least amount of >me to create. Developers always tend look at sample code provided in your documenta>on before they start wri>ng their own code. You can simply repurpose and reuse code your team wrote to test the APIs as sample code. • Using a 3rd party IPaaS plaCorm - Using a 3rd party Integra>on PlaOorm as a Service (IPaaS) like Azuqua’s can help partners integrate in minutes. You can have your APIs integrated on an IPaaS plaOorm for your API consumers to integrate with a minimal amount of coding. • Having all documenta.on and versioning in order - This is a no brainer but you will be surprised by how many APIs available out in the wild lack complete documenta>on. Again, using a 3rd party IPaaS plaOorm like Azuqua takes away most of the ambiguity that the document helps resolve.
- 8. Step 4: Measure your APIs’KPIs OK so let’s say you’ve followed all the advice given in this ar7cle. Now what? How do you measure how well your APIs are doing? What are some objec7ve ways of measuring how what you’ve built is performing? You can start tracking your API key performance indicators (API KPIs). Your API KPIs need to be closely 7ed in with your overall business objec7ves. Here’s a quick list of some basic parameters you can start measuring today: Step 4: Measure your APIs’KPIs OK so let’s say you’ve followed all the advice given in this ar7cle. Now what? How do you measure how well your APIs are doing? What are some objec7ve ways of measuring how what you’ve built is performing? You can start tracking your API key performance indicators (API KPIs). Your API KPIs need to be closely 7ed in with your overall business objec7ves. Here’s a quick list of some basic parameters you can start measuring today: Step 3: Receiving and ac<ng on feedback A cri7cal element of running a project is to listen to what the project’s stakeholders have to say about it. The success of projects relies extremely heavily on what the users have to say about it. The same principle applies to your APIs too. Once you’ve created your APIs, you need to ac7vely listen to what your API consumers have to say. You need to hear from them what’s working well and, more importantly, what’s not! As part of your API consump7on strategy, you should provide a resource where customers can provide their feedback. Something even more powerful for internal developers and partners can be to give them the ability to directly log bugs. In your team should be a clearly iden7fied owner to handle. This feedback loop is extremely important and you don’t want things falling through the cracks in this process. To avoid this, this workflow can easily be automated using Azuqua. Azuqua can help integrate your APIs with your defect tracking tools or engineering project management tools like JIRA in minutes.
- 9. Step 4: Measure your APIs’KPIs OK so let’s say you’ve followed all the advice given in this ar7cle. Now what? How do you measure how well your APIs are doing? What are some objec7ve ways of measuring how what you’ve built is performing? You can start tracking your API key performance indicators (API KPIs). Your API KPIs need to be closely 7ed in with your overall business objec7ves. Here’s a quick list of some basic parameters you can start measuring today: Step 4: Measure your APIs’KPIs OK so let’s say you’ve followed all the advice given in this ar7cle. Now what? How do you measure how well your APIs are doing? What are some objec7ve ways of measuring how what you’ve built is performing? You can start tracking your API key performance indicators (API KPIs). Your API KPIs need to be closely 7ed in with your overall business objec7ves. Here’s a quick list of some basic parameters you can start measuring today: Step 4: Measure your APIs’KPIs Let’s say you’ve followed all the advice given in this ar7cle. Now what? How do you measure how well your APIs are doing? What are some objec7ve ways of measuring how what you’ve built is performing? You can start tracking your API key performance indicators (API KPIs). Your API KPIs need to be closely 7ed in with your overall business objec7ves. Here’s a quick list of some basic parameters you can start measuring today.
- 10. • Number of API calls - This is one of the most basic but yet a very effec5ve indicator of the engagement levels of your overall API ecosystem. Tracking the number of API calls your system receives every day/week/month over5me can give you a good idea of the usage level of what you’ve built • TTFHW (Time to first hello world) - This is the tracking of the average 5me from when a user first signs up to the 5me when his first API call is successfully completed. This is an extremely powerful indicator of how your APIs are to integrate with. The lower this 5me, the beEer it is for your overall API consump5on strategy • Number of developer accounts - Keeping a track of the number of accounts registered lets you track the adop5on rate of your APIs and an upward or downward trend in the numbers can help you track performance • Percentage of partners registered - If your API caters to a set of partners you work with, a helpful metric for your company overall could be to track what percentage of this partner ecosystem is using APIs to interact with your systems • Performance - Basic health monitoring of how your APIs are working can be extremely valuable. Set benchmarks for your company and then track the basic health of system availability and API response 5me comparing it to benchmarks every 5me • Count of Defects/Errors - A second important health metric is tracking the number of API excep5ons. Use Azuqua to link API excep5ons to your API development team - with Azuqua you can have any unexpected excep5ons in your APIs be created as issues in JIRA. You can also setup Slack alerts in Azuqua to alert you if the number of excep5ons per minute/hour goes above a certain threshold.
- 11. Pro %p - Azuqua can easily help you improve the above 3 KPIs. Enabling easy integra%ons that require li>le coding while maintaining all the flexibility required helps Azuqua help you improve the performance of your API consump%on strategy
- 12. Conculusion It is pre)y easy to get caught up with the tac2cal issues once you have your APIs up and running. But it is extremely important to take a step back and look at whether everything is working as it should. The way to make sure everything is actually on track is to have an API consump2on strategy in place. Summing up the 4 easy steps to get your API consump2on strategy started today : Iden2fy your APIs’ “customers” Design for ease of use Receiving and ac2ng on feedback Measure your APIs’ KPIs #1 #2 #3 #4 A great example of this is Azuqua plugs into and adds the power to build workflows for GE’s cloud PaaS solu2on for an IoT plaTorm, Predix. Azuqua leverages the plaTorm’s APIs to power a workflow engine which provides the other plaTorm users an easy way to build workflows on the plaTorm. Azuqua’s workflow service on the Predix plaTorm enables the users of the plaTorm to build custom integra2ons into their other applica2ons. The workflows can plug into IoT sensor data from the Predix plaTorm and can trigger services on users’ other applica2ons. For eg. a 2cket can automa2cally be created in JIRA for the engineering team in case one of the sensors in the ven2la2on system indicates unusually high temperature. APIs are the key driver of growth for a plaTorm like this and Azuqua is helping supercharge API users using the microservices on the plaTorm. Azuqua has been cri2cal to GE. We can now quickly create complicated logic for processing streaming data. This enables a whole new level of capabili2es that I can build into my enterprise apps that I couldn’t before. This thing is awesome!” —Be) Bollhoefer, Architect, GE Digital Conclusion It is pre)y easy to get caught up with the tac2cal issues once you have your APIs up and running. But it is extremely important to take a step back and look at whether everything is working as it should. The way to make sure everything is actually on track is to have an API consump2on strategy in place. Summing up the 4 easy steps to get your API consump2on strategy started today : Iden2fy your APIs’ “customers” Design for implementa2on simplicity Receiving and ac2ng on feedback Measure your APIs’ KPIs #1 #2 #3 #4
- 13. Azuqua is an integra.on pla2orm that empowers unified customer experiences by connec.ng the applica.ons, data, and processes across siloed teams in order to increase customer sa.sfac.on and repeat revenue. About Azuqua