Dulanjana N.

# Key Takeaways - Adoption of APIs by enterprises have increased in leaps and bounds over the past decade. Be it RESTful APIs or not, APIs act as the gateway to your digital enterprise. Therefore it is important to properly manage and maintain APIs to provide a better digital experience for the enterprise stakeholders. - APIs need to be considered similar to business contracts. Design and implementation of APIs (business contracts) can make or break the enterprise's digital business strategy. - Integration-first and API-first are the two widely used strategies in most digital transformation projects; the latter proves to be the most effective and future proof method of the two. - APIs in an enterprise can be categorized as edge, utility, and domain APIs. Edge APIs act as the gateway to the enterprise systems while domain APIs expose the internal systems to the integration layer. Utility APIs contain the integration logic acting as the glue between edge APIs and the internal systems. - In API-first approach, we go through a seven step execution plan. Firstly, we identify the project objectives, then we get to know the enterprise ecosystem. After that, we identify probable integration points of the existing systems, required integration capabilities and use cases. Then for each identified use case, we design the APIs beginning from edge APIs and finally implement the integration. InfoQ Article: https://www.infoq.com/articles/api-first-integration/ Video link to a speech I gave based on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie9Z8nnK_io