front matter
APIs and microservices have taken the software industry by storm. Under the pressure of increasing software complexity and the need to scale, more and more organizations are migrating from monolithic to microservices architecture. O’Reilly’s “Microservices Adoption in 2020” report found that 77% of respondents had adopted microservices, a trend that is expected to continue growing in the coming years.
Using microservices poses the challenge of driving service integrations through APIs. According to Nordic APIs, 90% of developers work with APIs and they spend 30% of their time building APIs.1 The growth of the API economy has transformed the way we build applications. Today, it’s more and more common to build products and services that are delivered entirely over APIs, such as Twilio and Stripe. Even traditional sectors like banking and insurance are finding new lines of business by opening their APIs and integrating within the Open Banking ecosystem. The wide availability of API-first products means that we can focus on our core business capabilities when building our own applications, while using external APIs to handle common tasks such as authenticating users and sending emails.