Are you tired of the restrictions and lack of flexibility that come with a traditional monolithic architecture? The monolithic approach to application-building incorporates APIs after the coding process. It means the tightly coupled APIs leave little room for adaptation.
In contrast, the API-first approach follows the microservices API design pattern, which treats APIs as reusable, structurally consistent and loosely coupled products for user consumption. This strategy promotes agile software development since it means APIs can solve business problems before implementing code. Say hello to operational efficiency and exceptional customer experiences.
The reusability of APIs also means you can add new features without restarting the entire API design process. These features make the API-first approach crucial for developing cloud applications.
However, adopting an API-first approach can be challenging. It requires a thorough strategy to carry you from design to implementation and management. In this context, API management platforms such as Tyk can help you implement an API-first strategy for your cloud applications.
This article explains how Tyk Cloud can drive product growth for your organisations via an API-led strategy.
Scale the right way with Tyk Cloud
A rapidly evolving API system helps businesses adapt to growth. Traditional, monolithic applications treat APIs as a finishing touch that helps improve products and inter-system communication. However, this style of tightly wound API systems often requires refactoring or rearchitecting to enable APIs to adapt to a company’s growing demands. Hardly the basis for flexibility or rapid, agile expansion.
The API-led approach considers APIs as individual products that client applications must consume. It uses an established set of standards to design and create consistent, flexible APIs that can be reused across other services when your business needs change. Following a standard ensures all APIs are consistent, even when developed by different developers. This approach speeds up the time to deployment and ensures APIs are reusable for implementation across various applications.
What is API-led product growth?
API-led product growth builds its strategy around the API-first approach. This approach considers APIs as individual products rather than product components. It also situates them as building blocks for creating new products.
For these reasons, an API-led product growth strategy prioritises reusable, modular APIs. This strategy extends beyond treating APIs solely as an integration middleware component and confers additional capabilities on an application. You can take a deeper dive into what API-led product growth here.
Pros and cons of API-led product growth
Although the API-led strategy for product growth comes with numerous advantages, it can present a few drawbacks. Let’s look at the positives first.
Pros
- Improved developer experience: The API-led approach creates reusable, consistent APIs as building blocks for developers to implement application functionality. With a well-designed and consistent API that follows standard processes and protocols, developers have a smoother learning curve and can consume the API more efficiently. They also don’t need to worry about the multiple dependencies of the code-first architectural approach.
- Boosted productivity: The API-led approach uses a contract that adopts common standards in its design process. This contract instructs and establishes a set of tools for building APIs. As a result, teams can use this contract and work in parallel to design multiple APIs simultaneously – as long as they follow the contract. This way, developers can work in parallel, boosting productivity and agility in development.
- Reduced development cost: API-led growth produces reusable and interoperable products that developers can use across multiple channels for different organisational projects. Additionally, the API-led approach uses a common standard and designs the API to solve the business problem before coding. This helps prevent the additional costs of fixing API integration problems that may arise later in development.
- Enhanced flexibility: The treatment and design of APIs as individual, loosely coupled products helps reduce the number of dependencies, resulting in flexible APIs that ease collaboration among developers. This flexibility enables development teams to choose their technology stack and allows the API to evolve and grow without the complexity that monolithic API systems demand.
Cons
Achieving an API-led approach to product growth can be challenging. It requires significant input beyond capital investment, since organisations must ensure their systems can manage it properly. The adoption process also requires business stakeholders to understand the value of APIs, since the API-led approach requires significant time and resources. After all, APIs in this approach act as building blocks for products and services — but this also means they need consistent and proper management throughout their lifecycle.
Organisations must evaluate their readiness regarding scalability, security, availability and flexibility before adoption in a few key ways:
- Develop security strategies: It’s vital to secure API gateways without affecting performance or availability. You’ll need to consider whether the API development process will integrate seamlessly with authentication services.
- Establish management strategies: Decide on an API management strategy to oversee the API management lifecycle, from design to deployment and analysis. An efficient API management strategy will guide both the creation and management of successful APIs.
- Ensure strategy flexibility: When growing your business, flexibility is paramount. Your API strategies must be flexible to accommodate changing business needs, such as increasing demand.
These challenges can be deeply mitigated by platforms like Tyk. Tyk manages the entire API lifecycle and speeds up the adoption of API-led product growth architecture.
How Tyk enables API-led product growth
Tyk is an open source API gateway management platform. We help organisations create and deploy API services worldwide through our global infrastructure. Tyk Cloud employs an API-led approach to product growth through an easy-to-use platform, providing multiple deployment patterns for various business use cases.
Some of Tyk Cloud’s primary advantages include:
- An open-source API management platform: Using Tyk’s platform, you can create flexible, extensible APIs that seamlessly integrate with multiple technologies, no matter the language.
- Easy API development and deployment: Tyk eliminates the burden of acquiring and setting up infrastructure for your API environment.
- A centralised control plane: Monitor and govern your organisational APIs from a central panel that makes it easy to understand and control your data at a glance.
- Monitoring and analytics: Quickly evaluate and optimise API performance metrics and monetisation strategies with the Tyk Dashboard.
API management and deployment
Tyk’s central management layer has a control plane to give you fast access to your deployments and environments. This control plane also provides access to your Tyk Dashboard to help create, monitor and manage your APIs.
You can use this central management layer to design and plan your API deployment patterns, customising each pattern to required levels of client authentication, rate-limiting, centralised logging and more.
Tyk Cloud also enables global availability with the help of our global infrastructure, granting your business audience faster access to your API services by deploying APIs closer to their real-life locations.
API monitoring and analytics
Tyk Cloud provides an analytics dashboard to track and monitor the performance of your APIs, with functions and graphs to segment and analyse your API traffic.
The dashboard is updated via Tyk Pump, which enables the Tyk dashboard to be updated continuously. This grants you an up-to-date view of your API performance metrics, including the number of hits, errors and average latency over time.
Pushing this functionality even further, you can export analytics data via Tyk Pump to your favourite business intelligence tool. This puts you in a powerful position to develop business decision-making strategies and optimise your API security and performance.
Monetisation
APIs can help you implement numerous monetisation strategies, including free tiers, subscription-based billing, revenue-sharing and pay-as-you-go models. By eliminating the burden involved with API infrastructure setup and management, you can better focus on achieving your monetisation goals. Using the Tyk Dashboard, you can track your API analytics to evaluate consumption metrics and decide how to scale and improve your revenue effectively.
Flexibility
Tyk Cloud offers multiple API gateway strategies depending on your organisation’s requirements, ranging from single to multiple API gateway instances. For example, your business may choose a dedicated partner API gateway for more availability and increased security. On the other hand, your business might choose to benefit from the availability of a public API gateway used by most developers for other web and mobile applications.
In each case, Tyk offers a customised and flexible API management strategy that evolves with your business – you’ll never be locked into a single strategy. Tyk also supports multi-cloud API setups, which allow you to build gateways with whatever technology stack you prefer, preventing vendor lock-ins and promoting digital innovation.
Ease of use
Tyk Cloud can help alleviate some of the burdens of infrastructure acquisition and setup. It’s also really quick and easy to get started with Tyk; you can design and deploy APIs within minutes of setting up an account.
Tyk’s global infrastructure also makes your job easier by allowing you to deploy your APIs closer to your users, thus improving reliability, availability and performance. The global nature of our infrastructure also helps you navigate compliance regulations by isolating the teams and services that handle your sensitive data and information.
Build API-led architecture with Tyk
The API-led approach to product growth produces rapidly evolving APIs and, crucially, ladders into business growth. This approach requires efficient API management platforms such as Tyk Cloud to manage the API lifecycle efficiently. Tyk offers a fast API deployment time, allowing you to design and deploy APIs quickly and efficiently.
Tyk’s infrastructure enables global availability, so you can serve your international audiences, and monitoring and analytics that give insights into API performance to help you plan your API monetisation strategies. Everything you need to build an efficient, flexible business that’s ready to delight your customers.
Learn more about Tyk Cloud and see how it can supercharge your API-led product growth. After all, isn’t it time you secured your path to revenue growth?
