Learn about API orchestration and how it can enhance the implementation and integration of your APIs with microservices and other assets.
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 is a centralized approach to coordinating multiple API calls, services, and workflows to fulfill a single business process or client request.
API orchestration in simple steps:
- A client sends a single request
- The orchestration layer validates and authenticates it
- Multiple backend services are invoked
- Data is transformed and aggregated
- Errors, retries, and policies are handled centrally
- A single response is returned
What is an orchestrator?
An orchestrator is the centralized system or component that manages, coordinates, and controls the execution of multiple services, APIs, or workflows to achieve specific business objectives, as part of your API orchestration approach.
How does API orchestration work?
An API orchestration layer receives a request, invokes multiple backend APIs in a defined sequence or in parallel, applies business logic, handles errors and retries, and returns a unified response to the client.
An orchestration API could, for example, take a single API request, then handle multiple calls to different services before delivering a single response. 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 works 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 prioritizes flexibility, optimized processes, and easy service evolution.
API orchestration vs related concepts
| Concept | Core definition | Control structure | Key characteristic | Best use case |
| API orchestration | Centralized control of workflows | Centralized (the “conductor”) | Logic is held in a single executable process that directs subordinate services | Complex business transactions requiring specific ordering (e.g., processing an order) |
| API integration | Point-to-point data exchange | Direct / 1:1 | Focuses on reliable data connectivity and synchronization between two specific systems | Syncing customer data between a CRM and an email marketing tool |
| API choreography | Decentralized service coordination | Decentralized (the “dancers”) | Event-driven; services react to events without a central commander | High-scale, loosely coupled microservices where services need independence (e.g., an inventory update triggering a price change) |
| API composition | Client-driven aggregation | Aggregated / gateway | Combines results from multiple services into a single response for efficiency | Populating a user dashboard that requires data from user profile, billing, and notification services |
Benefits of API orchestration
With an API orchestration framework in place, you can take your infrastructure to the next level:
- Transform requests and responses into different formats: This gives you greater flexibility in how your services connect and helps you organize interactions efficiently. The orchestration layer neatly handles different data request formats, standardizing payload formats for effective communication.
- Integrate legacy systems more efficiently: The orchestration layer smooths the way that legacy systems communicate with other parts of your platform.
- Manage permissions and authorizations between services: API orchestration supports permissions to flow reliably and securely.
- Mitigate traffic spikes: Use your API orchestration layer to implement API call restrictions that help protect your service from demand spikes, preventing it from crashing when overwhelmed.
- Coordinate new data flows: Orchestrate data flows between your API and microservices for greater efficiency and deeper insights – for example, using the Saga microservices pattern for transactions.
- Boost security: The orchestration layer sits in front of your backend, meaning you can enhance security, for example by using runtime policies to check for malicious code.
- Business process optimization: By ensuring data flows smoothly, with seamless format transformation and standardization across your existing APIs and services, you achieve optimized processes and significantly reduce wasted resources.
The benefits of API orchestration combine to deliver an overall enhancement to performance, supporting you to deliver more reliable, performant, and secure services. Different roles benefit from this in different ways. For example:
- For developers, API orchestration reduces frontend complexity.
- For architects, it enables controlled workflows and governance.
- For enterprises, orchestration supports compliance, auditability, and scalability.
Core elements of API orchestration
Let’s break down API orchestration and look at some of its core elements, to understand how the orchestration layer works in a bit more detail.
Integration
Legacy systems often use a mix of API types (REST, SOAP, etc.). Orchestration helps by transforming data into different formats between the front and backend for smoother data flows between new APIs and services and legacy systems.
Data transformation
This introduces standardization for call formats, meeting client and backend data format expectations and enabling communication between different services.
Logical workflows
Logical workflows between calls and responses enable communication and coordination between different services and data formats. Many API orchestration tools support this through visual workflow design functionality.
Automation
Orchestration can automate complex workflows, operations and interactions between different services for streamlining and efficiency.
Monitoring and error notifications
Observability at the orchestration layer (rather than checking each microservice or app) enables faster error detection and diagnosis. Combine with automated error notifications for maximum benefit, using an open source observability framework such as OpenTelemetry
Retries
For seamless data flow, even when experiencing temporary issues, API orchestration handles automatic retries.
Authentication and API security
Whether you use multi-step OAuth 2.0 flows or simply user-password credentials, the orchestration layer ensures APIs and data are only accessed by those with permission to do so.
Caching
Use an API orchestration framework to reduce the number of round-trip API requests and improve performance.
Common use cases
The benefits of orchestration really shine through when we look at its different use cases. Let’s consider three common examples of API orchestration in action…
E-commerce checkout flow
Orchestrating an e-commerce checkout flow involves managing data across numerous interconnected services, such as pricing, inventory, shipping, and payment gateways. This complex backend process necessitates a robust API orchestration layer to ensure a seamless customer experience. Without effective API orchestration, customers are more likely to abandon their carts and seek out competitors.
API orchestration helps by streamlining the workflows between all of these different services, so that shoppers can search for items, place orders, arrange delivery and pay for their goods with no headaches. The orchestration layer is busy managing workflows, aggregating data, transforming requests, applying conditional logic and more, to support this seamless user experience.
Travel booking systems
Travel booking systems are notoriously complex. With dynamic offerings for products such as flights, hotels, and hire cars, availability and prices are constantly changing. These complexities, including currency conversions, necessitate a coordinated approach to managing multiple API calls, which is where API orchestration comes in.
API orchestration is a crucial means of optimizing the workflows between all the elements of such platforms, coordinating between different APIs, databases, microservices and more.
Financial services integration
Financial services often combine legacy and bespoke systems with newer technologies, all while requiring robust security and audit trails that keep data and funds safe and regulators happy. Workflows can be complex, to say the least.
Ultimately, for end users and customer-facing staff to achieve their desired outcomes, such as completing a loan application or making a cross-border payment, a seamless experience is paramount. This is where robust API orchestration plays a crucial role, ensuring that the underlying complex API integrations function smoothly to deliver these critical functions.
API orchestration supports the achievement of these outcomes in an efficient and optimized manner, ensuring the right workflows are in place. This is increasingly important as Open Banking and Open Finance evolve.
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 to 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 data orchestration?
Data orchestration is the automated coordination and management of data workflows. It ensures data moves efficiently and reliably between systems, applications, and processes.
What is orchestration in microservices?
Microservice orchestration creates cohesive business processes by coordinating multiple individual microservices. The orchestration layer enables microservice communication and deployment processes, empowering businesses to build and manage complex architectures.
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 centralized control, access, and security management for consistent authentication, authorization, and data protection measures, keeping regulators happy (and your compliance team)
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
API orchestration vs API integration
API orchestration is not the same as API integration. API integration is about connecting different applications so they can exchange data. API orchestration enables you to achieve specific desired outcomes by structuring workflows and coordinating interactions in ways that deliver efficiency and security while performing complex tasks. This means you get more from your infrastructure, automating workflows and supporting different parts of your platform to communicate and interact in new ways.
What is the difference between orchestration and choreography?
Orchestration and choreography are two fundamental patterns for coordinating services in distributed systems, each with distinct approaches to managing service interactions. Wondering when to use an orchestrator? It works well for:
- Complex business processes with multiple steps
- Legacy system integration coordination
- Compliance requirements that demand audit trails
- Error handling that requires centralized management
- Multi-step transactions with rollback requirements
What is API composition vs orchestration?
API composition and orchestration can both achieve a desired outcome by coordinating and combining multiple APIs but there are fundamental differences between them
| Aspect | API composition | API orchestration |
| Purpose | Aggregate data to meet a client’s specific request | Execute a business process or workflow |
| Primary driver | Client-driven | Centralized orchestrator |
| Control location | Client or API gateway | Orchestration layer/service |
| API invocation | Multiple APIs called independently | APIs coordinated in sequence or parallel |
| Dependency management | Handled by the client | Managed by the orchestrator |
| Data aggregation | Client combines responses | Orchestrator manages data flow |
| Error handling and retries | Client responsibility | Built into orchestration layer |
| Granularity | Fine-grained, request-specific | Coarse-grained, process-oriented |
| Typical use case | Tailored UI or client-specific views | Complex business logic spanning services |
Wrap up
API orchestration can streamline and automate complex business processes, delivering enhanced efficiency, agility, and scalability and supporting performance optimization 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.
Why not dive into some other aspects of API governance and API strategy while you’re here?