API's - Part 1 - Getting Started Microservice's
Are you getting requests for data daily? If your in the modern technology age you should know that data is king and probably always will be. Data is the new currency and the new customers expect to be able to extract that data at will. In a customer facing data reporting world API's are very important in providing the information your customers need.
API's are the backbone to any application both public and private data transactions. If you have tons of databases and many access points creating your own API might be the next thing you should consider. All in one place and easily accessed by URLs that you can share with your clients. I know that daily I get asked for data from large data lakes and individual databases and creating API's has allowed me to respond and produce the data needed, quickly, for my clients. I am big on using micro services that allow that data to be individually/separately managed so that maintenance is far easier.
What should I do? There are many options these days on how you want to manage your data. You will need to assess what it is your trying to do exactly. It can be that your data access private areas and can be secured with either a bearer token or credentials (SSO), etc... So the first thing you need to know is whos going to be accessing your data and for what reason. Do you need it to be secured or a set of public API's that don't require credentials. I would suggest secure all of them. You can certainly charge for that data at a later date once those API's perform as they should. Don't charge people for broken API's.
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The micro service architecture is much like putting modules(API parts) together under an API gateway. Since I am a .NET programmer this can be done using .NET Core and can either be severed on a windows server or Linux server. The Linux server is faster but requires some knowledge in management of that server. Windows is pretty easy and almost equally as fast depending on how much data you are brining down at one time. Really that's your bench mark when determining what to separate and keep together inside your API's or microservice architecture.
2. DETERMINE WHERE TO HOST YOUR MICROSERVICE
More coming soon including tools that make this process much faster and consistent. Thanks for reading thus far.
Very Nice Article!! Billy