Mike Amundsen

APIs are transforming the business world at an increasing pace. Gain the essential skills needed to quickly design, build, and deploy quality web APIs that are robust, reliable, and resilient. Go from initial design through prototyping and implementation to deployment of mission-critical APIs for your organization. Test, secure, and deploy your API with confidence and avoid the "release into production" panic. Tackle just about any API challenge with more than a dozen open-source utilities and common programming patterns you can apply right away. Good API design means starting with the API-First principle - understanding who is using the API and what they want to do with it - and applying basic design skills to match customers' needs while solving business-critical problems. Use the Sketch-Design-Build method to create reliable and scalable web APIs quickly and easily without a lot of risk to the day-to-day business operations. Create clear sequence diagrams, accurate specifications, and machine-readable API descriptions all reviewed, tested, and ready to turn into fully-functional NodeJS code. Create reliable test collections with Postman and implement proper identity and access control security with AuthO-without added cost or risk to the company. Deploy all of this to Heroku using a continuous delivery approach that pushes secure, well-tested code to your public servers ready for use by both internal and external developers. From design to code to test to deployment, unlock hidden business value and release stable and scalable web APIs that meet customer needs and solve important business problems in a consistent and reliable manner.

Robust, Reliable, and Resilient

Design and Build Great Web APIs

Michael Amundsen

With this concise book, you’ll learn the art of building hypermedia APIs that don’t simply run on the Web, but that actually exist in the Web. You’ll start with the general principles and technologies behind this architectural approach, and then dive hands-on into three fully-functional API examples. Too many APIs rely on concepts rooted in desktop and local area network patterns that don’t scale well—costly solutions that are difficult to maintain over time. This book shows system architects and web developers how to design and implement human- and machine-readable web services that remain stable and flexible as they scale. Learn the H-Factors for representing application metadata across all media types and formats Understand the four basic design elements for authoring hypermedia types Convert a simple read-only XML-based media type into a successful API design Examine the challenges and advantages of designing a hypermedia type with JSON Use HTML5’s rich set of hypermedia controls in the API design process Learn the details of documenting, publishing, and registering media type designs and link-relation types

Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node

Ronnie Mitra

Matt McLarty

Irakli Nadareishvili

Microservice Architecture: Aligning Principles, Practices, and Culture

Mehdi Medjaoui

Erik Wilde

Continuous API Management: Making the Right Decisions in an Evolving Landscape

Leonard Richardson

Sam Ruby

RESTful Web APIs: Services for a Changing World

A lot of work is required to release an API, but the effort doesn’t always pay off. Overplanning before an API matures is a wasted investment, while underplanning can lead to disaster. This practical guide provides maturity models for individual APIs and multi-API landscapes to help you invest the right human and company resources for the right maturity level at the right time. How do you balance the desire for agility and speed with the need for robust and scalable operations? Four experts from the API Academy show software architects, program directors, and product owners how to maximize the value of their APIs by managing them as products through a continuous life cycle. Learn which API decisions you need to govern and how and where to do so Design, deploy, and manage APIs using an API-as-a-product (AaaP) approach Examine ten pillars that form the foundation of API product work Learn how the continuous improvement model governs changes throughout an API’s lifetime Explore the five stages of a complete API product life cycle Delve into team roles needed to design, build, and maintain your APIs Learn how to manage your API landscape—the set of APIs published by your organization

Making the Right Decisions in an Evolving Landscape

Continuous API Management

The popularity of REST in recent years has led to tremendous growth in almost-RESTful APIs that don’t include many of the architecture’s benefits. With this practical guide, you’ll learn what it takes to design usable REST APIs that evolve over time. By focusing on solutions that cross a variety of domains, this book shows you how to create powerful and secure applications, using the tools designed for the world’s most successful distributed computing system: the World Wide Web. You’ll explore the concepts behind REST, learn different strategies for creating hypermedia-based APIs, and then put everything together with a step-by-step guide to designing a RESTful Web API. Examine API design strategies, including the collection pattern and pure hypermedia Understand how hypermedia ties representations together into a coherent API Discover how XMDP and ALPS profile formats can help you meet the Web API "semantic challenge" Learn close to two-dozen standardized hypermedia data formats Apply best practices for using HTTP in API implementations Create Web APIs with the JSON-LD standard and other the Linked Data approaches Understand the CoAP protocol for using REST in embedded systems

Services for a Changing World

RESTful Web APIs

Powerful web-based REST and hypermedia-style APIs are becoming more common every day, but instead of applying the same techniques and patterns to hypermedia clients, many developers rely on custom client code. With this practical guide, you’ll learn how to move from one-off implementations to general-purpose client apps that are stable, flexible, and reusable. Author Mike Amundsen provides extensive background, easy-to-follow examples, illustrative dialogues, and clear recommendations for building effective hypermedia-based client applications. Along the way, you’ll learn how to harness many of the basic principles that underpin the Web. Convert HTML-only web apps into a JSON API service Overcome the challenges of maintaining plain JSON-style client apps Decouple the output format from the internal object model with the representor pattern Explore client apps built with HAL—Hypertext Application Language Tackle reusable clients with the Request, Parse, Wait Loop (RPW) pattern Learn the pros and cons of building client apps with the Siren content type Deal with API versioning by adopting a change-over-time aesthetic Compare how JSON, HAL, Siren, and Collection+JSON clients handle the Objects/Addresses/Actions Challenge Craft a single client application that can consume multiple services

Enabling Reuse Through Hypermedia

RESTful Web Clients

Serverless computing is a hot topic today. Many organizations are now using cloud-based applications for workflow, distributed logic, and externally managed data stores. In this practical guide, Mike Amundsen ( RESTful Web Clients ) focuses on the why, what, and how of this computing model, including key aspects of serverless operations and reasons why companies are moving in that direction. You and your development team will learn the basics of serverless computing and the essential elements you'll be working with. You'll also explore how serverless changes the way software architects and programmers think about applications. Finally, this insightful report provides a quick reference guide to the three top serverless platforms in use: Amazon Lambda, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. You'll examine: How a serverless environment enables software architects and programmers to write and use services on the network Basic building blocks of serverless: functions, virtual machines, and elastic runtime environments Seven key elements of serverless platforms, including workflow & orchestration and scaling & reliability The common challenges of building network-based systems that scale well How serverless computing is moving toward additional abstraction and mobility.

What Is Serverless?

Microservices can have a positive impact on your enterprise—just ask Amazon and Netflix—but you can fall into many traps if you don’t approach them in the right way. This practical guide covers the entire microservices landscape, including the principles, technologies, and methodologies of this unique, modular style of system building. You’ll learn about the experiences of organizations around the globe that have successfully adopted microservices. In three parts, this book explains how these services work and what it means to build an application the Microservices Way. You’ll explore a design-based approach to microservice architecture with guidance for implementing various elements. And you’ll get a set of recipes and practices for meeting practical, organizational, and cultural challenges to microservice adoption. Learn how microservices can help you drive business objectives Examine the principles, practices, and culture that define microservice architectures Explore a model for creating complex systems and a design process for building a microservice architecture Learn the fundamental design concepts for individual microservices Delve into the operational elements of a microservices architecture, including containers and service discovery Discover how to handle the challenges of introducing microservice architecture in your organization

Aligning Principles, Practices, and Culture

Microservice Architecture

At some point, we all need to design and implement APIs for the Web. What makes Web APIs different than typical component APIs? How can you leverage the power of the Internet when creating your Web API? What characteristics to many "great" Web APIs share? Is there a consistent process you can use to make sure you design a Web API that best fits your needs both now and in the future?In this webcast Mike Amundsen describes a clear methodology for designing Web APIs (based on the book "RESTful Web APIs" by Richardson and Amundsen) that allow you to map key aspects of your business into a usable, scalable, and flexible interface that will reach your goals while creating a compelling API for developers. Whether you are looking to implement a private, partner, or public API, these principles will help you focus on the right metrics and design goals to create a successful API.

Mike Amundsen

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