Are Your APIs Ready For The Coming Containerization Evolution Of The API Space?

If you were at Defrag in Colorado last November, or in Sydney, Australia for API Days last week, you’ve heard me talk about what containers are doing to APIs. There is a subtle, but important shift in how APIs are being deployed occurring right now, and as John Sheehan (@johnsheehan), the CEO of Runscope says, containers are doing for APIs, what APIs have been doing for businesses.

As I was processing news for API.Report this morning, I found more evidence of this, with the release of logging API container from Logentries. APIs have made resources like “logging”, much more modular and portable, for use in multiple channels like mobile or via websites. A containerized logging API makes the concept of a logging API much more portable, by adding an entirely new dimension for deployment. You don’t just have a logging API, you now have a logging API that can be deployed anywhere in the cloud, on-premise, or on any physical object.

This opens up a whole new world of APIs, one that goes beyond just a programmable web, quickly evolving us towards a programmable world, for the better, and the worse. Last month I asked, when will my router have docker containers by default? I received an email from a major network equipment manufacturer this week, letting me know that they are working on it. This means little containers on the Internet enabled objects across our worlds, ushering in the ability to deploy localized, wholesale APIs, giving us the ability to manifest exactly the virtual API stacks that we need, for any objective.

I try not to hype up where things are going in the API space, so I will stick with calling containers a significant evolution in how APIs are done. This new way of deploying APIs will push the evolution around the business of APIs, changing how we make generate revenue from valuable resources, while also putting even more stress on the politics of APIs, with introduction of more privacy and security concerns—not to mention adding a whole new dimension of complexity.

I’m not 100% sure where all of this is going. As with the rest of the API space, I struggle with making sense of all of this in real-time, and the allocation the mental bandwidth to see the big picture. All I can say at this moment, is to make sure you work to better understand various approaches to containerization, and adopt a microservice approach to your API design. Beyond this, all we can do is keep an eye on what companies like Logentries are doing, when it comes to containerized API deployment, and try to learn as fast as we possibly can.