You’ve designed an API. Fantastic. But what about implementation and integration with your microservices and other existing assets? This is where API orchestration comes in. Let us walk you through what an API orchestration layer is, why you need one and how it works.
What is API orchestration?
API orchestration means adding a layer of functionality that can coordinate between incoming requests, multiple API services and responses.
Benefits of API orchestration
With an API orchestration framework in place, you can:
- Transform requests and responses into different formats
- Integrate legacy systems more efficiently
- Manage permissions and authorisations between services
- Mitigate traffic spikes
- Coordinate the flow of data in new ways
- Boost security
You can automate many of these processes by using API orchestration.
How does an API orchestration layer work?
An API orchestration layer enables communication and integration between different services, resulting in a unified experience. An orchestration API could, for example, take a single API request and then handle multiple calls to different services before delivering a single response. In so doing, the orchestration layer enables a smooth frontend experience while building in the potential for authentication and checking for malicious code (and more) before requests reach the backend.
This approach can work well for large-scale development teams and complex microservices solutions. By implementing an experience API to handle the orchestration logic between the services, as part of a microservice gateway and access pattern, the business can achieve greater flexibility and enable the easy evolution of its services.
Core elements of API orchestration
An orchestration layer has several core elements, meaning it can deliver numerous functions and benefits:
- Integration: legacy systems often use a mix of API types (REST, SOAP, etc.). Orchestration can help by transforming data into different formats between the front and backend (and vice versa), achieving smoother data flows while integrating new APIs and services with legacy systems.
- Data transformation: this introduces standardisation for call formats, meaning both the client’s and the backend’s data format expectations can be met while enabling communication between different services.
- Logical workflows: adding a layer of logical workflows between calls and responses enables communication and coordination between different services and data formats, all in the middle of the data workflow pipeline. Many API orchestration tools support this through visual workflow design functionality.
- Automation: orchestration can automate complex workflows, operations and interactions between different services. Doing so is crucial to delivering efficient and streamlined processes and services.
- Monitoring and error notifications: an API orchestration system provides observability at an abstract level, so you can handle monitoring at the orchestration layer rather than checking each microservice or app for errors. This allows for faster detection and diagnosis of errors, introducing greater efficiency with automated error notifications.
- Retries: automatic retries can keep data flowing smoothly despite any temporary problems that may arise.
- Authentication and API security: authentication and authorisation mechanisms differ between one API and another, but this doesn’t present a headache when you have an orchestration layer in place. Whether you use multi-step OAuth flows or simply user-password credentials, the orchestration layer ensures APIs and data are only accessed by those with the permission to do so.
- Caching: reduce the burden on your backend by reducing the number of round-trip API requests, with an API orchestration framework thus supporting potential performance improvements.
API orchestration tools
Evaluate tools carefully in terms of features, compatibility, community support and documentation. Examples of API orchestration tools include:
- Apache Kafka: a distributed streaming platform
- Camel: an open source integration framework
- Netflix Conductor: Netflix’s microservices orchestration engine
- AWS Step Functions: a serverless workflow orchestration service
The variety of tools available highlights the different approaches that can be taken, with API orchestration open source and proprietary solutions available.
Is an API gateway an orchestrator?
An API gateway isn’t precisely an API service orchestrator but it can perform a range of similar tasks. This is true of both an open source API gateway and a proprietary one.
An API gateway provides intermediary functionality between the client and the backend. It can perform similar tasks as orchestration, such as caching, monitoring and transformations.
A key difference is that an API gateway serves as a unified entry point for API requests, managing and simplifying interactions between the client and the backend through APIs. An orchestration layer, meanwhile, manages the execution of multiple tasks or services in a workflow or distributed system to achieve a specific goal.
That said, there are ways that an API gateway can be used to deliver orchestration gateway functionality. Tyk, for example, has two ways of combining multiple endpoints into a single API call for the consumer, either using a Javascript batch API request or Tyk’s Universal Data Graph.
What is orchestration in microservices?
Microservice orchestration is all about creating cohesive business processes by coordinating multiple individual microservices. The orchestration layer enables the communication and deployment processes required to make this happen, empowering businesses to build and manage complex architectures efficiently.
There are many benefits to using API orchestration in a microservices architecture. It can:
- Simplify client interactions by providing a unified client interface
- Support more agile business processes and end-to-end visibility, to underpin performance improvements and scalability
- Add efficient workflow control and error handling elements
- Enable you to integrate microservices more easily with legacy systems
- Enable centralised control, access and security management for consistent authentication, authorisation and data protection measures, keeping regulators happy
Should you use an API gateway for microservice orchestration?
Implementing microservice orchestration can be challenging. Using an API gateway and the right API management architectural and deployment pattern can help. The gateway layer can deal with routing, authentication, load balancing and more while adding the simplicity of a single, unified entry point for incoming requests.
However, an API gateway can mean that your microservices deployment architecture requires more orchestration and management due to its increased complexity.
Other considerations for microservice orchestration include:
- The use of containers and asynchronous communication
- The implementation of service discovery, monitoring and logging
- The separation of data storage, with a dedicated data store for each microservice
What is API composition vs orchestration?
API composition and orchestration can both be used to achieve a desired outcome by coordinating and combining multiple APIs. There are fundamental differences between the two different approaches.
API composition is a client-driven approach that specifies the data requirements and invokes multiple APIs independently. The client or an API gateway aggregates and composes the data from various APIs needed to fulfil the client’s request. The client makes separate requests to multiple APIs, retrieves the data from them and combines it into a single response tailored to its specific needs. The APIs being composed are called independently, with the client using granular control to make separate requests for data.
API orchestration is a centralised approach. The service orchestrator coordinates and manages the sequence, dependencies and data flow between multiple APIs or microservices to accomplish a more extensive business process or workflow. The execution is sequential or parallel, while the orchestration layer can deal with error handling, retries and compensatory actions in the event of exceptions or failures. The focus is on the business processes the API orchestration layer needs to achieve.
Wrap up
API orchestration can streamline and automate complex business processes, delivering enhanced efficiency, agility and scalability. An orchestration layer can support performance optimisation and better customer experiences. This puts businesses in a powerful position to drive innovation and deliver value to their customers, enabling them to gain a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Why not dive into some other aspects of API governance and API strategy while you’re here?
