What is a composable API platform and how can you leverage the power of open standards to create one in a scalable, sustainable manner? This was the topic of our recent webinar, which looked at how to design and build your own composable platform and what you can gain by doing so.
We’ve pulled the top takeaways out of the webinar and shared them below. Read on to discover what makes a good API platform, what to think about when designing one and why open standards are crucial.
The need for API platforms
There’s no doubt that the ever-expanding API universe is getting increasingly complex. However, it’s also driving increasing value. APIs are now at the heart of everything; in 2023, API calls made up 71% of all web traffic. That translated to around 1.5 billion API calls on average for a typical enterprise site.
Yet building APIs is hard. As well as thinking about functional logic, you have to focus on operational matters including security, governance, observability, discoverability, developer experience and more. Then there’s the business value to consider – along with practicalities. How will you manage everything across distributed teams? How will you cater for evolving business needs? And how will you expand your tool stack while bringing all your tools together in a cohesive manner, rather than draining time trying to manage countless individual elements?
All of this means that building APIs isn’t an easy endeavour. However, API platforms can help. They can deliver a composable ecosystem of intentionally designed APIs that empower developers, partners and customers to deliver their desired outcomes. This isn’t just a technical undertaking – API platforms are about the business coming together to build a solution that drives value both directly and indirectly.
The need for composability
Why does composability matter? Well, let’s consider the pain points that organizations so often face as they grow.
Many API ecosystems were born of a business trying to solve a particular problem, usually with a small team, a monolithic architecture and primarily a focus on the web. They enjoyed fast, easy deployments for single products with a small userbase.
Over time, those businesses scaled in multiple ways and their landscape evolved. For many, this encompassed moving from a monolithic architecture to a microservices architecture, usually acquiring platforms, solutions and tools along the way. Many moved to the cloud to be closer to their users and reap the rewards of easier scalability. Some also expanded to a multi-channel approach, with APIs needing to support multiple clients across an array of platforms (perhaps adopting GraphQL in the process). In line with all of this was the need to beef up security, as the growing architectural complexity created a larger attack surface.
Each step of such an evolution adds to the complexity that modern businesses face, which is why solutions and platforms that help navigate these evolving needs and maturity levels have become so important.
This increased complexity can make APIs harder to discover, increase the surface area for attack and make it harder to troubleshoot issues. It can also lead to a lack of standardization – or no standardization at all! The more layers of complexity that are added, the more these problems grow, all while efficiency dwindles in terms of resources and costs.
Composability helps with all of this. It can help address your evolving needs, including the need for dedicated solutions for security, governance and/or observability. Because the last thing you need is to add to the complexity by trying to manage all these individual pieces by themselves. That’s certainly not going to be efficient in terms of resource management.
A composable API platform helps with the balancing act between maintaining the flexibility you need while reducing complexity. It combines multiple components – identity providers, portals, gateways and so on – brought together in a flexible and vendor-agnostic way, powered by open standards to ensure the platform can evolve as the needs of your users evolve and mature.
Futureproofing your business with open standards
Composable API platforms can not only reduce complexity but can also help you futureproof your business and control your costs.
Let’s consider this in relation to vendor lock-in. Starting off with a small solution and evolving it as you grow might help keep your costs down at first. However, it’s all too easy to end up digging deeper and deeper into one vendor’s solution as you focus on meeting your present-day needs. This might work in the short-term but the more you commit to a single vendor, the more expensive it can become to evolve flexibly in line with your future needs. You can end up having to create custom solutions that add to your costs and complexity as you grow.
That said, starting with a platform that has all the possible features you might need one day also isn’t an ideal solution. This approach means you can end up with a higher cost platform that has a lot of capabilities you don’t use now – and might never use.
A composable API platform powered by open standards is the answer. It empowers you to standardize the way in which developers create APIs, increasing developer productivity by making it simpler to build APIs and easier to learn what your processes look like.
Using open standards as part of this means your developers can work with industry standards, for example by using OAS as the definition for how you create APIs. With that approach in place, your developers can create APIs however they like, from using ChatGPT to generate the whole thing to using an API design tool. However they do it, they’re all working towards OAS, ensuring standardization across the board.
In terms of future growth, embracing open standards means you’re in a strong position to benefit from the continuous adaptation of global technology trends.
Designing a composable API platform
Addressing the pain points we mentioned above – APIs being hard to discover, increased attack surface area, harder troubleshooting and lack of standardization – makes a strong case for a composable API platform. But where do you start when it comes to designing one?
There are three areas of focus which are important here:
- Strategy and metrics
- Implementation
- Evaluation and iteration
Let’s break these down a bit.
Strategy and metrics
What does good look like for your business and use case? This is the key starting point when it comes to developing your strategy and designing key performance indicators to deliver your metrics for that success. Areas of focus will depend on your individual organization, but could include:
- Productivity – think about your deployment and release cycles and how your developers can get where they’re going in the fastest and most efficient way.
- Cost savings – both direct and indirect.
- Developer happiness – your developers are the ones who need to use your API platform, so think about how easy onboarding is and how discoverable your APIs and platform capabilities are. You could measure these through things such as net promoter scores and survey feedback.
Stakeholder management is another important part of your strategy. You can get your stakeholders involved and create a shared vision through an API platform roadmap workshop. This looks at strategic and implementation priorities over a fixed period of time, as part of your API platform maturity journey.
Implementation
The way you implement your composable API platform needs to address the pain points your organization is facing. Looking at the platform through the lens of open standards can help with this, as well as futureproofing your solution.
The open standards that can help you design a scalable, sustainable platform include OAS for discoverability and design, OAuth for security, OpenTelemetry for observability and Open Policy Agent for centralized governance.
You can bring the benefits of these together in a composable API management platform that mediates between these different solutions, rather than you having to manage everything individually. That’s the power of a composable, open standards native API platform (like Tyk!).
Evaluation and iteration
It’s important to evaluate the impact of your API platform. To do so, compare the length of your release cycles, your average deployment time and the costs/cost savings before and after the implementation of your solution. Shorter release cycles, reduced deployment time and lower costs all speak to the success of your composable platform, while a proactive approach to learnings can help with future iterations.
Remember to communicate your achievements and learnings internally and externally, to engage all stakeholders in the success of your API platform solution.
How to build a composable API platform powered by OAS, OAuth and OTel
We’ve covered the theory above. Now it’s time to see for yourself how to build a composable platform. You can watch our webinar to catch the live-action demo.
