Thursday, August 31, 2017

API Development - Not Engaging Early Enough

I was reading a blog from Nordic APIs - 5 Frequent Developer Community Mistakes (And How to Fix Them).

I could relate quite closely to one of the mistakes - Not Engaging Early Enough.

Many of us make this mistake frequently. We thought we have a great API to launch, but we actually do not really know what the market is looking for!





A new development process is suggested:

  • Idea : Generate initial tech design documents. 
  • Think: Add some context to those documents, make them more digestible, explain motivation, come up with NDAs. 
  • Explore: Send to a small subset of developers for feedback. 


THEN

  • Build
  • Launch
  • Tweak

Great reminder!

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Tuesday, August 29, 2017

More and more APIs exposed by Ministries

The trend is pretty clear these days - ministries in Singapore are encouraged to expose more and more APIs for external entities to consume, in particular organizations/companies.

This will save huge amount of human hours if manual tasks like Form Submissions can be automated. Yes, we have a labour crunch here in Singapore. We do not have enough local people in our workforce. Thus automation is key going forward!


My team is currently designing APIs for one of the financial institutions in Singapore. This week, we have a new request to integrate with Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) for Commission Income Information Submission.



The current process of submission is very manual.


It requires a person to download a program (Offline Validation Program - OVP) from IRAS to validate a XML/Excel file. Once validated, one has to log in via SingPass (Singapore Personal Access) and then manually upload the XML/Excel file to IRAS portal.


The new API service allows applications to directly submit Commission Income Information to IRAS , thus eliminating the need to download and validate using OVP and login to IRAS portal for submission.


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Saturday, August 19, 2017

Microgateway

“CA Microgateway is a great example of how more and more of the tech industry is realizing that APIs are not just how we integrate tools and apps, APIs are the new way of doing business and building new revolutionary technologies,” Said Geoff Domoracki, Founder of API World.

CA Microgateway has received a 2017 API Award for the category: Microservices APIs. While the product is still in beta, its ability to deliver aggregation, orchestration, security and management to microservice architectures impressed the judging panel for API World this year.


Kind of strange to me that a beta product can win an award. :)

So what is really a Microgateway? Why do you need one if API Gateway has been recommended over the years?

I could not find a good explanation in CA documentation. Well, since it is still in beta, I would expect there are not too many real use cases to talk about.

Google Apigee has better explanation.

  • Reduce latency of traffic for close proximity services 
  • Keep API traffic within the enterprise-approved boundaries because of security or compliance purposes 
  • Continue processing messages if internet connection is lost





Features of Google Apigee Microgateway:



When to use Microgateway over traditional Enterprise Gateway?


This is the most important slide. 


Summary:
  • API has to be light-weight. (otherwise, how do you classify yourself as microservice?)
  • Few APIs to a gateway 
  • No complex mediation rule (aka no heavy-duty processing)
  • Small scale (100+ APIs per sec)
  • Internal API for app-to-app integration 



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Wednesday, August 16, 2017

In-place Upgrade vs Greenfield Upgrade

There are different school of thoughts when it comes to upgrade - In-place vs Greenfield (or Side-by-side). 


In-place Upgrade could mean 2 things:
U1. Executing an upgrade wizard that comes with the software
U2. Install the latest version on another disk partition, separated from the current version that is Live.

I refer to the former in this context.

When cost is involved, most will go with In-place Upgrade as a greenfield upgrade requires another identical set of hardware and operating system. This, I totally agree.

When customers have cost constraint, I will usually recommend U2 for major version upgrade. Minor version upgrades are usually bug and security fixes. I will usually use approach U1. No brainer.


Now, there are 3 groups of specialists who will give you different opinions when you ask them if it would be wise to perform upgrade using approach U1:
S1. Product Engineers
S2. Product Presales
S3. Product Professional Service Engineers or Service Delivery Partners


Now, if the wizard is written by you (S1), would you say "No, U1 is not the better approach"? This group of specialists also tend to assume that the product is deployed out-of-the-box with no or minimal customization. My foot. Now, even if they agree that the product is highly customized, I come to realize that QA of the wizard is usually not well carried out. There are few too many edge cases that they would not be able to think of in their own labs. (can you blame them? no. product engineers are usually the ones who do not like to meet and interact with customers. thus they do not get to know the business-world requirements and they definitely do not have the full picture of how the products they developed are deployed in real world)

What would S2 say? You know the KPI of a presales? Can you say that the product that you are selling so hard has no seamless upgrade wizard in front of your customers? This group of specialists has the least hands-on. They are really good in sweet talking and reading documentation. You ask them to set up the software from scratch. They look at you like you are an alien. "Dude... there's a VM with everything installed. Come on...". Asking S2 deep technical/operational/migration questions is usually a waste of time, unless you do not mind hearing white lies. (well, to be honest, they do not want to cause harm. just that they do not have the right hands-on experience)


S3 is the group of specialists that are doing the shit job, even to the extend of implementing empty promises from S2 that are totally out-of-scope. S3 usually tells the hard truth, which customers would not like to hear at times. "well, I have paid tons of dollars for this piece of software? I don't care. You get it fixed to what was being promised". However, they have years of hands-on and have seen many types of deployments. They also have many years of migration experience. (ok, I have also seen delivery partners that are incompetent. there was once a big customer in SG asking this delivery partner how to extend their current SSO infrastructure to support multiple domains. to our surprise, a consultant from this delivery partner suggested to set up a totally new environment to support this new domain. omg! most SSO products can support cross-domain single sign-on these days. It's a out of the box feature)


Azimuth has been in the Identity business for a long time and we have performed numerous upgrades for customers. Softwares, especially IDM and SSO, are "fragile" animals. IDM products are usually highly customized, while SSO products are usually deployed as a farm of server nodes to handle huge traffic.

SSO solutions usually have low tolerance for downtime. When in-place upgrade is adopted, there are many questions to ask. 

  1. How do you upgrade to a new major release then? Say there are 10 nodes to upgrade.
  2. How do you upgrade to a release that is at least 2-3 versions apart? 
  3. How do you upgrade the underlying configuration store, if any? Say there are 4 nodes to upgrade.
  4. How do you ensure protected applications work as before? Say at least 50 applications are involved which belong to 10 application teams? 
  5. How do you ensure customized codes work as before? 
  6. How do you ensure deprecated functions that are replaced with new functions in the new release work as before? 
  7. How do you ensure new features requested by customers work as promised? 

How do you complete the above all within a narrow downtime window of 5 hours (12am to 5am)? Nearly impossible.

A presales will never take the above into consideration when being asked about which is the better upgrade approach. Stick with product documentation is always the right approach. Crap.

One would also question why would there be challenge and surprise if well-conducted UAT is carried out prior to Production upgrade. From experience, I can conclude that most UAT environment is not identical to Production. Seldom, less than 10%. Why take the risk and bang your balls for that tiny 5 hours window? It's not worth taking the risk. Rolling back, investigating why, perform another round of upgrade, activating the same whole village of application teams to perform end-to-end testings are just not worth the trouble. In fact, reputation is at stake.


Some customers are also one of the kind. They are not technical enough, yet they want to have a say. So they go around asking opinion from various sources. A service delivery partner does not come from the Product organization. The customers will take the advice from the Product Presales over what the Service Delivery Partner recommends. "How can I not believe what XXX has said? XXX is from the same Product organization. He sure knows better than you."

Oh, really? 

Now, who is performing the upgrade? What if something goes wrong during upgrade? Whose responsibility is that? To ask a service delivery partner to perform upgrade again at a fixed cost (we practice fixed cost in Asia) is really not a fair deal.







Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Approval Anywhere

These days, Approval Anywhere seems to be a must-have feature in product development.

One Identity recently launched Safeguard - a Privileged Access Management (PAM) solution.



The biggest feature is what One Identity is calling “Approval Anywhere,” a cloud-based workflow to securely approve session or password requests from any device.




CA has a similar "Approval Anywhere" feature from the CA Identity Portal.


It comes with an OOTB Mobile Web application. No configuration is required to enable and configure this mobile application. The application can be browsed through any mobile browser. CA Identity Suite will automatically detect that you're browsing from a mobile device and redirect you to the mobile application.


This feature helps a lot during presentation, especially to the C-level. Believe me. :)

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Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Exposing APIs in the Financial Services

I met up with a number of financial institutions over the past few months. You know these are established companies with long history and their IT infrastructure is strong and big.

Out of 10, 9 of them will have SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) in place. Then they'll have ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) solution to support their SOA initiatives. Web services are everywhere. Integration with internal and external parties are also common.

Why would they need a API Management then? Below are some of my slides:




Security, Sandboxing and Scalability is my most-used tagline.


Yes, they could have deployed their own DIY solutions, as the concept of API Management is not something new. Honestly, if your team is highly technical and security-conscious, there is really no need to buy a ready-built APIM product out there.

It's a matter of time to market and where you want to spend your time in.


Do you want to spend most of your time in your core business? Or do you want to split your precious time in managing the security risks and scalability issues when your APIs are exposed?

It's a choice - $ vs Time.


Below is a statistics showing the target audience of exposed APIs in the Financial Services:


The goals of deploying a APIM solution in the Financial Services section as illustrated below:


Interesting.


Tuesday, August 8, 2017

CA API Developer Portal UI Customization - Part II

CA Developer API Portal aims to build and monetize a broad and effective digital ecosystem, enterprises must make it easy for developers to find and use APIs. It enables developer communities and support app marketplaces with essential capabilities for management, security and monitoring.



For the developer portal to be useful, the forums must be a go-to place for developers. The UI has to be intuitive and modern to use.


Our designers continues to wow us. They have converted the original look-n-feel of the forum, which looks like a piece of software developed by engineers, into an UI where information nicely presented and easy to navigate.






Well done.

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Friday, August 4, 2017

CA API Developer Portal UI Customization

CA API Developer Portal is an add-on to CA API Gateway.

CA API Developer Portal simplifies API discovery for developers and provides them with access to enterprise data so they can get to building apps fast. Relationships with developers, partners and third parties are easily managed and analytics provide valuable operational data for optimizing your business.

Developers can use the portal to:

  • Discover what APIs are available and apply for access 
  • Receive authorization to use APIs and get API keys 
  • Get started on development faster with educational tools including an API catalog, sample applications, mobile device SDKs and code generation


There is a in-built CMS (Content Management Server) that shipped together with CA API Developer Portal.


Most customers use the CMS to customize to their corporates' look and feel. However, almost all look the same in terms of layout.





We have a customer who demands that he does not want his CA API Developer Portal to look like any other CA API Developer Portal. :) 

Can it be done, yet utilizing the same CMS? If you ask your engineers, no way! 

"It can't be done. I have played with the CSS within the CA API Developer Portal already. It's very tough. Not worth the effort."


Customer did not buy it. He was willing to pay. Well, we engaged a professional design firm (owned by a friend of mine). 

Here we go ...



Customer is super happy! The best part is there is no total overhaul. The designers are very well-versed with CSS. They used back the same CMS and tweaked the CSS only.


I am impressed. 

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Thursday, August 3, 2017

Kong API Developer Portal

Kong is a scalable, open source API Gateway. Kong runs in front of any RESTful API and is extended through Plugins, which provide extra functionality and services beyond the core platform.


We explored Kong few months back and liked it for its flexibility and scalability. A customer came along and was willing to give open source a try. Deal on.

During development, we discovered that Kong is overly flexible. :)  

I still remember the days when we were Compuware partner deploying and giving consultation to Dynatrace customers. There were far too many features and it allowed great flexibility. Beginners or customers who were not too technical complained. They got lost. 

With that experience still fresh in my mind, I suggested that we build a API Developer Portal on our own. And this portal should cater for this customer's daily operations. Nothing else. Whatever is not required, we should hide it.


The team has done a great job!






For this particular customer, the business use case is simple.

1. They have their internal application teams ("Clients") that want to consume APIs.
2. Each client will be issued a Client ID and Client Secret to exchange for a OAuth2 token prior to calling APIs.
3. Each client can only be granted access to specific set of APIs ("Service")


So, the UI is simplified to suit this need.

a. Create API



b. Assign API to Service



 c. Create Client and assign Service to Client




Very simple to use to get the job done.


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Wednesday, August 2, 2017

API Management Lifecycle

Reset. Recharge. Refocus.


These days, API Management is a hot topic. Every ministry, every insurance company, every bank ... they are trying to publish APIs to the external world.

What's the purpose? It is clearly illustrated in the diagram below:

1. Higher customer satisfaction
2. Higher transaction volumes
3. Higher digital reach

As simple as that.



So, a lot of vendors rush in to deliver API projects. Most think it's as simple as deploying the API Gateway, configure a few security policies and create a few endpoints. Then proceed to sign-off.

So simple. Easy money.

Well, if money is so easy to earn.... :)

From our experience with a few customers who have gone live so far, this has been a long journey - the Full Lifecycle API Management journey.




The whole process is time-consuming. It involves multiple decision makers from different business units. The implementation is tough and requires multiple iterations to get an API published in an optimal manner.

The lifecycle requires a API architect to oversee the project and to get the various stakeholders to head towards a common goal. The architect has to manage internal customers (backend application owners) and external customers (API consumers/developers).

The published APIs have to be easy to consume, yet they have to adhere to the highest security standard.


Not as simple as many vendors would have expect a API project to be.

This is where we like to position ourselves. This challenge is what we are looking forward to.

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