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Companies are always looking for new ways to increase efficiency and reduce costs while maintaining excellence in the quality of their products and services. A big part of cloud computing that IT departments and service providers increasingly look to is APIs (application programming interfaces) to enable automation, in turn driving efficiency, consistency and cost savings. How are businesses doing this, and where are the opportunities for future development?

Enabling operational efficiency

One important outcome of the automation enabled by APIs is consistency. Through automation, businesses remove human error (and human expense) from operational processes. Even when a repeatable task is well-documented with a clear procedure, when human workers perform the task it is likely that you will end up with varied outcomes. On the other hand, if that repeatable task is automated, it will be performed in the same way every time, improving operational reliability and in turn operational efficiency. API enabled platforms are driving a true re-think in how we manage IT; we are moving quickly from a process-driven, reactive world to an automation-driven, proactive world.

Enabling DevOps automation

APIs allow for more dynamic systems that can scale up and down to deliver just the right amount of infrastructure to the application at all times. For example, instrumentation in your application that provides visibility to an orchestration layer can tell when more capacity is required in the web or app tier. The orchestration layer can then come back to the APIs provided by the infrastructure and begin spinning up new web servers and adding them to the load balancer pool to increase capacity. Likewise, systems built on APIs will then have the instrumentation to tell when they are overbuilt, for example at night and can then use the APIs to wind down unnecessary servers in order to reduce costs.

Indeed, through the ability to script the powering-on of development and testing environments at the start of the business day and automatically powering-off at the end of the business day, businesses can realize huge cost-savings on their hosting up to 50-60 per cent in some cases.

Overall, leveraging APIs in support of a DevOps strategy is always a blend of optimizing for cost, for performance and the ability to have deep app-level visibility.

Using APIs to automate reporting

APIs are also highly useful in reporting procedures, as many applications are now producing vast amounts of data that are often an untapped asset. IT teams therefore need to think about how to make those datasets available efficiently in order to build a dynamic reporting engine that can potentially be configured by the end user, who will be the person that understands the nature of the information that he or she needs to extract from the data.

This is frequently accomplished through APIs. IT teams and application services providers can use APIs to build systems that process the data and make it accessible to end users immediately, so that they do not have to go through a reporting team and do not lose any of the real-time value of their data.

API use in enabling business continuity and disaster recovery

The benefits of automation through APIs make them a crucial part of modern disaster recovery approaches. The assumption that you’ll be able to access all of the tools that you would need during a disaster through the typical user interfaces is not always true. In the modern world of highly virtualized infrastructure, APIs are the enabler for the core building blocks of disaster recovery, in particular replication, which is driven from the APIs exposed by the virtualization platforms. The final act of orchestrating DR, failover, is also often highly API dependent, for these reasons.

In essence, disaster recovery is one specific use case of the way that APIs enable efficiency and operations automation. Humans make mistakes and processes become very difficult to maintain and update. Therefore a DR plan based on processes and humans executing processes is not an ideal option to ensure the safety of your business in the event of a disaster. Kicking off DR can be likened to “pressing the big red button”. However, if you can make it one button that kick starts a set of automated processes, this will be much more manageable and reliable than thirteen different buttons, each of which has a thirty-page policy and procedure document that must be executed during a disaster.

The future of APIs

Despite the clear benefits of API-enabled automation and technology, the broader IT industry has not yet fully realized the potential of this technology, particularly in industries that have been leveraging information technology for a long time. In these industries, we are seeing a critical mass of legacy applications, legacy approaches to managing infrastructure, and legacy staff skillsets.

It is likely that the younger generation coming into the IT industry will move towards more comprehensive API use and maximize the value of APIs because this generation has grown up with them and learned with them. As we see disruptors displace incumbent packaged software players and new entrants to the enterprise IT community, we are likely to see more realization of the benefits of API use – particularly when utilizing their cloud infrastructures fully. However, this will take time, and we may be one to two full education cycles away from producing and maturing enough entry level IT professionals that have the education and training required to fully make use of the opportunities offered by APIs, particularly cloud ones.

Working as part of cloud computing solutions, APIs are also reducing the cost of developing new ideas. Businesses that want to innovate no longer need to make large upfront investment in equipment to get an idea off the ground. They can quickly start their business on cloud infrastructure as a service platforms and use APIs to control and power systems down to reduce costs as needed. As the new product or service grows, organizations can quickly scale on the same cloud infrastructure. And for it to truly cut costs, APIs should be part and parcel of cloud solutions – not a pricey addition to it.

As more and more innovative startups develop in the tech space, and enterprises increasingly search for new solutions and ways of working, we are likely to see even more creative uses of APIs to drive automation, consistency and efficiency. It’s important that businesses work to stay ahead of the market and competitors by making full use of new API-enabled software and other technologies to fully realize the benefits and cost-savings that they offer.