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API or application programming interface is, simply put, the code that allows two different software programs to communicate with each other. It gives access to data or a service functionality in a database or app. This, of course, has far-reaching applications.

Why API-first? Top benefits for your enterprise

APIs can help enable interactions with other apps, smart devices, and human users. And today, companies in the know have begun to leverage APIs to drive digital transformation. For many organizations, it can help support their new platform business models.

An API-first approach has many proven benefits.

Here are two use cases where an API-first approach makes a tangible difference:

An API-first e-commerce platform allows for seamless integration with payment gateways, logistics providers, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. This translates to a smoother user experience, faster checkout process, and efficient order fulfillment.

A financial services app leveraging an API-first approach can easily integrate with stock exchanges, credit bureaus, and other financial institutions. This enables features like real-time stock quotes, credit score checks and personalized investment recommendations.

What does “good API design” look like?

You can future-proof API architecture with good design.

When it comes to API design, thumb rules to follow are to design APIs with scalability and agility in mind. Leverage microservices and API gateways to create modular, loosely coupled APIs, and employ open standards and versioning to ensure compatibility and to future-proof your API investments.

These features translate to some best practices that need to be synonymous with your process.

10 best practices for an API-first development strategy

By following these best practices, you can establish a robust and successful API-first development strategy. The focus on business alignment, technical excellence and continuous improvement will ensure your APIs deliver real value and contribute to the overall success of your software projects.

Business Business Practices

Ensure the design is aligned with business goals: Don’t just build features, build value. Ensure APIs directly contribute to achieving overarching business objectives, whether it’s driving revenue growth, streamlining partner integrations, or fostering a developer ecosystem.

Common goals, a clear path, shared processes – that’s the recipe for successful app development. When there’s a strong team of principals that get both business and tech speaking the same language, that’s where we see the wins. Lucas Eagleton, Technology Principal, Cloud Kinetics

Start stakeholder collaboration early: Get stakeholders in the loop from the start – potential end users, business teams, designers, the dev team, the infrastructure team, and anyone else who may be relevant. You will be able to better define data requirements, access control requirements, as well as API use cases.

Consider business impact (for old and new users) when versioning: While you introduce new features in new API versions, also keep in mind compatibility for current/existing clients on the API.

Technical Best Practices

Follow reusable well-defined design principles: Modular API components will help with seamless integration into different applications and bring down development effort/time. Implement well-defined design principles like RESTful architecture for consistency and ease of adoption. Enforce clear naming conventions, resource structures, and response formats (JSON, XML) for efficient integration.

Build security from the start: Prioritize security throughout the API development lifecycle. Implement strong authentication and authorization mechanisms (OAuth, JWT) to control access and prevent unauthorized usage. Utilize secure communication protocols (HTTPS) and robust data validation to safeguard sensitive information.

Implement continuous testing: Your testing strategy should span the entire development process and include unit testing, integration testing, as well as performance testing. Comprehensive testing helps improve reliability, functionality, as well as scalability of the API.

Developers are your API champions. Invest in a comprehensive developer portal with clear, interactive documentation, code samples, tutorials, and sandboxes for testing. Bring the team in early if you can. If not, a large amount of rework/rewriting of components/V2 of newly released products will need to be done because it doesn’t fit the requirements that got considered too late. Ideally, if you want to combine disparate solutions, build them in at the start with a bigger picture view.

Create style guides: Be sure to create and circulate an API style guide at a company level to bring consistency across APIs. This should cover data formats, conventions, security best practices, and error-handling approaches.

“By helping design the API first, we have pieces that flow out so that everyone has a central documentation to refer to. Sure, there might be some reworking and changes, but this enables parallel teams to work on it in tandem,” says Lucas Eagleton, Technology Principal, Cloud Kinetics

Monitor API usage: Monitoring API usage patterns can help you spot areas for improvement and keep it relevant vis-a-vis customer needs.

Use automation: Automation tools can greatly streamline workflows and help cut the time and manual effort involved in API documentation generation, testing, and deployment.

Test, Test, test the API: Do remember to test the API at various stages to see how tweaks or changes or additional features are impacting overall functionality as well as security. Collaboration is key so get all stakeholders looped in early on. And then test, test, test! Keep this up throughout the development lifecycle.

API testing tools help cover a range of scenarios and test it on all the key features/areas earlier in the life cycle, a trend called “shifting left”. This helps spot issues as soon as they come in and allows teams to fix them right away. Punit Chheda, Vice President – Enterprise Architecture & Consulting, Cloud Kinetics

In an API-first approach, this is mission critical because an API that is not performing, has availability issues or errors can result in customer churn and have a negative impact on your business. The goal is to catch issues well in time so that they do not flow into production and eventually impact users. By executing API tests within CI/CD pipelines, teams can manage more rapid iterations, frequent releases, and simultaneously also lower the risk of bugs. Overall, this helps lower the risk of eroding customer trust and protects the brand image

API in action: A Cloud Kinetics case study

Here’s an instance of how we streamlined global operations for a food manufacturer with Mulesoft API deployment. A leading global food and confectionery company faced challenges integrating their complex supply chain, logistics and manufacturing systems spread across various locations. Streamlining these integrations was crucial for optimizing operations and ensuring efficient data flow.

Challenges for the enterprise included:

• Global system disparity: The company’s supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing systems operated independently across different regions, hindering data visibility and process automation.
• Integration complexity: Integrating these disparate systems required a robust and scalable solution to manage the complexity of data exchange.

The company partnered with Cloud Kinetics to implement an API-led integration strategy using Mulesoft CloudHub, a hybrid integration platform. Here’s how Cloud Kinetics addressed the challenges:

• Mulesoft CloudHub implementation: Cloud Kinetics chose Mulesoft CloudHub as the central platform for API deployment due to its scalability, flexibility, and pre-built connectors for various enterprise applications.
• API design, development, and deployment: The team designed, developed, and deployed foundational APIs that could seamlessly connect the disparate supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing systems.
• Standardized integration patterns: Established standardized integration patterns to ensure consistency, reusability, and maintainability of the APIs across the entire ecosystem.
• Expert support: The team provided ongoing support throughout the development lifecycle, including troubleshooting any integration or workflow issues, and reviewing API design, code, and security posture.

Outcomes that stood out for the client:

• Streamlined operations: The successful API deployment enabled seamless data exchange between previously siloed systems, significantly streamlining global supply chain, logistics, and manufacturing operations.
• Reusable APIs: The creation of foundational APIs provided a reusable foundation for future integrations, saving development time and resources.
• Standardized integrations: Standardized integration patterns ensured consistency and maintainability of the API landscape, simplifying future modifications and enhancements.

Mulesoft and a well-defined API strategy can empower businesses to overcome complex integration challenges and achieve operational efficiency across a global footprint.

At Cloud Kinetics, we’ve seen first hand how an API-driven approach can help our customers drive growth through new business models. It translates to faster collaboration and enables enterprises to quickly on-board new product offerings and enhance customer experience. Harsha Bhat, Senior Director – Applications, Cloud Kinetics

Prioritize API design and design your API with reusability in mind. Remember, the API world is constantly changing. Be prepared to iterate on your API design based on usage and feedback. This is an investment that pays off in terms of faster development, increased agility, and a more robust and scalable software ecosystem – one that has far-reaching business impact.

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As the company’s customer base rapidly grew and user demand spiked prior to events, it urgently needed a scalable, dynamic and adaptable infrastructure that could handle peak loads.

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As part of their optimization journey, Sieu Viet wanted to review their cloud infrastructure on AWS to take stock of existing capabilities and to identify next steps aligned with their business goals. In addition, a planned CRM system change was lined up as the company headed into its next phase of growth.

“Our partnership with Cloud Kinetics has been invaluable as we navigate our cloud journey and scale our digital infrastructure. Their expertise and focus on continuous optimization perfectly complement our business goals, making them a trusted partner in our transformation strategy.” Dat Vo, Head of Tech, Sieu Viet

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As more organizations embrace the cloud, securing cloud-native applications has become increasingly complex. Fragmented multi-vendor solutions attempt – and struggle – to shield an attack surface that’s expansive, dynamic and vulnerable. The solution to this growing challenge in cybersecurity could lie in cloud-native application protection platform or CNAPP.

CNAPP is a comprehensive solution that gives DevSecOps and DevOps teams unified automated security that oversees containers, workloads, compliance and more – the entire application lifecycle. It is being used by organizations to crank up security as well as visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud, and private and public cloud environments. But first, let’s see why there’s such a strong case for CNAPP and how it fares over traditional solutions.

Why traditional cybersecurity solutions aren’t always optimal

How did security end up being so complicated? Organizations have grown their cloud investments over time and added solutions and products in phases, organically. The accompanying security products layered over these have also been heterogeneous and operated in silos. The result? DevSecOps is fashioned sometimes from as many as 10 different tools each working in isolation!

Add to that the fact that cloud environments often involve microservices, containerization or serverless architecture. A far cry from traditional IT environments. This is why traditional intrusion detection and firewalls just don’t cut it when it comes to the distributed and dynamic cloud environments of today. These modes of security were designed to serve a fixed network perimeter like a data centre. Not the complex distributed cloud environments that are par for the course today.

The most significant driver is the need to unify risk visibility across the entire hybrid application and across the entire application life cycle. This simply cannot be achieved using separate and siloed security and legacy application testing offerings. – 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms

Your cloud security & CNAPP

What is CNAPP? A cloud-native application protection platform offers a simplified security architecture to enable enterprises to reduce complexity and costs of security solutions that operate in silos. CNAPP lets a business benefit from a unified continuous security structure without any added investments by way of more manpower or investment in more tools.

The compelling case for CNAPP in cybersecurity

The global CNAPP market is set to grow at 19.9% (CAGR) between 2022 and 2027, to USD 19.3 billion, driven by a growing risk of breaches and reported incidents of cyber threats, an increasing use of cloud solutions, a manpower crunch within the IT security teams in-house, as well as the potential vulnerability posed by an increasingly WFH/remote workforce.

By 2025, 60% of enterprises will have consolidated cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) capabilities to a single vendor, up from 25% in 2022. 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms

CNAPP was built to protect cloud-based infrastructure and applications. The solution is agile, dynamic and scalable. Large existing cloud users like ISVs and SaaS companies have begun to see the benefits of CNAPP.

The issue of combined risk is something CNAPP is capable of dealing with. While security solutions like cloud infrastructure entitlement management (CIEM), cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) do offer data on vulnerability and risk they are unable to come together in a way that – as Gartner puts it – connects the dots. CNAPP identifies the effective risk across the various layers that comprise cloud-native applications, helping prioritize risk and easing the burden on overstretched security and developer teams.

Here are some features of CNAPP that make it the smart choice for enterprises that operate in the cloud.

• Is a combined cloud security solution
• Is purpose-built for cloud-native environments
• Is integrated with the app development life cycle
• Does not add additional complexity to the application
• Supports scanning and quick response to any misconfiguration

How to choose a CNAPP solution

There is a palpable shift underway in the market, to consolidate cloud security solutions and benefit from the ease and visibility that a single CNAPP solution brings.

If you are considering CNAPP, here is a quick guide to choosing the right partner. The exercise will be most effective if those doing the selection are drawn from the various teams that will be involved with or impacted by the solution – namely, developers, development security, app security, cloud security, workload security and middleware security teams.

Make a CNAPP decision for your cybersecurity!

Finding a good partner for your CNAPP solution is critical and Cloud Kinetics has the expertise you need. Cloud Kinetics offers CNAPP in partnership with Plerion, an all-in-one Cloud Security Platform that supports workloads across AWS, Azure and GCP. If securing your entire cloud with an all-in-one cloud security platform is on your mind, we can help!

Cloud Kinetics is an award-winning, certified cloud transformation and managed services partner headquartered in Singapore and operating globally. We use cutting-edge platform-driven services to accelerate and secure our clients’ digital and business transformation journeys. Get in touch with our cloud experts for a non-obligatory discussion at contactus@cloud-kinetics.com

You can also download the CNAPP Cloud Security Handbook Here

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Key Highlights Include:

👉🏻Proactive Planning: Strategic approaches for long-term project success.

👉🏻Stakeholder Engagement: Effective methods to align development goals with business objectives.

👉🏻API Design Excellence: Uncover the power of an API-first approach – enhancing flexibility, accelerating innovation, and ensuring scalability.

👉🏻The Power of Documentation: How clear documentation minimizes project risks and enhances team productivity.

To view the full recording click here:

Our Webinar Panelists:

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ServiceNow is a powerful product and is respected because it has an ability to manage everything as a Service. The best part of ServiceNow is its comprehensive managed workflow that provides various support and enables enterprise service domains to define services, provide an intuitive service experience, deliver service, assure service availability and analyze critical service metrics, process delivery and management, real-time communication, customer interaction, collaboration and resource sharing, testing, quality assurance and more.

ServiceNow concentrates on Cloud-based operations, operations portfolio management and it allows users to perform various services and processes like handling priority tasks, incidents, activities project management, problem management and providing support to customers via addon and inbuilt plugins.

As a ServiceNow Specialist Partner:

• CK has better access to ServiceNow resources to upgrade its skills and remain updated on the latest ServiceNow technology.
• CK aced the Fastest 100 points (within 3 months). This demonstrated the speed with which we achieved the highest rating on customer satisfaction surveys to qualify as a specialist ServiceNow partner.

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True, every step of a CI/CD pipeline can be executed manually, but it is automation that shows its true value. Meanwhile, pipelines are predefined tasks that decide what needs to be completed and when. Tasks are usually executed in parallel to accelerate delivery. A typical CI/CD pipeline includes stages where code is pushed to the repository and stored, code changes trigger the build, which is tested and then deployed to the production environment.

Enabling CI/CD pipeline for container-based workloads

• CI/CD, a DevOps strategy: CI/CD is a DevOps tactic, in fact it is the backbone of the DevOps methodology, which brings together developers and IT operations teams to deploy software. CI/CD facilitates DevOps teams with a single repository to keep automation tools and store work so that the code can be continuously integrated and tested for quality.
• Containerization, a DevOps tool: In containerization, all the components of an application – the software, its environment, dependencies and configuration – are bundled into a single isolated unit called a container. Each unit can be deployed in its own space on a shared operating system, on any computing environment, on-premise or on the cloud. Containers are lightweight and portable, and very conducive to automation. Containers and orchestration tools facilitate CI and CD.
• Docker, a containerization solution: Docker is a containerization solution used widely in DevOps and workflows. It is an open source platform that allows developers to quickly and easily build, deploy, update, run and manage containers. Docker makes it easy to decouple apps from their surroundings and it also contains a collection of container images that can be used for development.

Common use cases for containerization workloads

• Modernizing legacy application development practices to container-based platforms
• Moving pipelines and workflows across multiple microservices and applications with ease
• Providing DevOps support for CI/CD
• DevOps enables compliance with industry standards and organizational policies while shipping releases faster to production.
• Minimizing errors during the build, deploy, test, and release process of a new software release
• Providing easier deployment of repetitive tasks. 

CI/CD pipeline architecture

DevOps with containers: The workflow

1. After coding, developers push the code to a shared repository such as GitHub. Frequently merging the code and validating it is one way to ensure CI is error-free. To start the process, a GitHub webhook triggers a Jenkins project build. When code changes are made and committed to the repository, the pipeline gets activated. It downloads the code and triggers a build process. 
2. In this step, the code is compiled, artifacts are built, dependencies are sorted out and stored in the repository. Environments are created, containers are built and images are stored for roll out. This is followed by the testing processes. The Jenkins build job uses a dynamic build agent in AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to perform a container build process.
3. A container image is created from the code in source control and is then pushed to an AWS/Docker Container Registry. 
4. Using the process of CD, Jenkins deploys an updated container image to the Kubernetes cluster.
5. The web application uses Dynamo DB as its back end. Both Dynamo DB and AWS EKS report metrics to the AWS Monitor.
6. A Grafana instance provides visual dashboards of the application performance based on the data from AWS Monitor.

Containerization infrastructure and configuration as code

The true power of containers becomes visible when orchestrating with Kubernetes and DevOps pipelines can be automated in better ways. Kubernetes is a portable open source platform used to manage containerized workloads and services. It facilitates both automation and declarative configuration. YAML, a data-serialization language frequently used for writing configuration files, is utilised in Kubernetes deployments and resources. Its advantage is that YAML files can be created and stored in a Git repository and all changes can be tracked and audited. 

• Continuous deployment pipeline with no downtime: The objective of the pipeline is to perform a set of tasks that will deploy a fully tested and functional service or application to production. The need for frequent deployments is handled best by Kubernetes via its container orchestration mechanism.
• Easy rollbacks: The Kubernetes framework has  a built-in rollback mechanism. When new code is ready to be pushed to a container, the new desired state is defined, and Kubernetes orchestrates creating new containers and removing existing ones. If a problem arises, the immutable nature of Kubernetes containers allows easy rollbacks to the previous state.
• On-demand infrastructure: Kubernetes, through the use of the configurations, can easily scale infrastructure up and down based on the resources needed to handle the workloads of the application. And it is elastic by nature.
• Run everywhere pipelines: With Kubernetes architecture, we can easily migrate Containers and pipelines to anywhere in the same cloud or all on-premises.

Containerization features

• Availability: Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)  operates and scales the Kubernetes control plane across many AWS availability zones to offer high availability. As part of the Amazon Kubernetes Service cluster, application traffic is distributed to one or more containers (pods) that run the application as individual microservices. This approach to running containerized applications in Kubernetes provides a highly available infrastructure for the applications.
• Scalability: Amazon EKS makes it easy to run Kubernetes on AWS and on-premises. It automatically allows scaling of the number of cluster’s worker nodes to meet the application’s workload demands. As the application size increases, the EKS cluster can scale up the number of Kubernetes nodes.
• Resiliency: Amazon EKS is built into the Kubernetes architecture and its components are resilient by nature. Kubernetes components monitor and restart the containers (pods) if there is any issue. Combined with running multiple Kubernetes nodes, applications can tolerate a pod or node being unavailable.

Security and security threats in containers

Container security is an important part of a complete security assessment. It involves the practice of protecting the containerized environment and applications from potential risks and threats by implementing a combination of security policies and tools.

• Access and authorization exploits: Providing access to authorized users and blocking all other users accessing the platform. And encrypting K8’s configuration files (for example, web. config and appsettings.json), particularly in a containerized setup.
• Container image vulnerabilities: Security mechanism to prevent malicious attacks is the key.

Detecting code vulnerabilities, outdated packages, malicious code, and other harmful threats during the build stage can improve security dramatically. 

Monitoring CI/CD pipelines, end-to-end

• Monitor health of the CI/CD build pipeline and set up cognitive, proactive alerts spanning various tools
• Assess performance and quality of deployments in a unified way across multiple tools
• Monitoring the pipeline performance and reporting issues combines Amazon Monitoring Service (CloudWatch) with Grafana for visual dashboards; or extending build pipeline monitoring to include application monitoring (Nagios) and container monitoring (Kubernetes).

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Why DevOps for our customers

Our Enterprise DevOps consulting services help organizations achieve higher efficiency in Development and Operations, quicker time to market, rapid delivery, reliable and better quality of software builds. With early identification of emerging development issues, always let the code be in a releasable state with minimal effort and automating the process. And incorporating all DevOps capabilities and cultures: collaboration, automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, monitoring, and rapid remediation.

DevOps benefits your organization in many ways:

• Increased efficiency among IT groups
• faster development and deployment
• Automation of build and deployments
• Faster go to the market for software
• Quick feedback implements
• No downtime of deployment
• Improvement to the whole software delivery pipeline and practices through builds, validations, and deployment
• Modernized development processes through increased responsibility and code ownership

Why Cloud Kinetics for DevOps

Our DevOps solutions help customers align with the goals fast and reliably, and streamline the development and operations processes to achieve a faster time to market.

• Specialized DevOps Center of Excellence
• Large multi-cloud customer references in Asia
• Centralized, shared services model offers better value
• DevOps compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management
• Usage of infrastructure as code and policy as code

Cloud Kinetics’ DevOps approach

CK’s DevOps approach orchestrates all DevOps tools, CI/CD processes, automates infrastructure, and streamlines operations, facilitating Infra/Dev/Ops/QA/Security communication. And practices that need to accelerate software delivery.

CI/CD Tools Canvas

DevOps is a method of build and deploying applications, it requires the right IT team and right tools to create. Generally, for the DevOps practice, we rely on the CI/CD pipelines, containers, and cloud-native tools. And can be extended to open source, proprietary, or supported distributions of open source technology.

Code repository – Code repositories enable multiple developers to work on code coupled with version control enabled. Tools used for source code management include AWS CodeCommit, and opensource tools such as Git and GitHub.

CI/CD pipelines – The continuous integration tool initializes CI-CD processes to create, test, and validate code in a shared repository. Mostly automating the manual work. Tools used for CI/CD pipelines include AWS CodePipeline and opensource tools such as Jenkins.

Continuous delivery – extends the automatic steps through production-level tests and configuration setups for release management. Tools used for continuous delivery include a combination of AWS CodePipeline & AWS CodeBuild and opensource tools such as Jenkins.

Continuous Deployment – Invoking tests, configuration, and provisioning, as well as monitoring and potential rollback capabilities. Tools used for continuous delivery include AWS CodeDeploy and opensource tools such as GitLab, Chef, and CircleCI.

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