Delivering Your API as a Virtual Appliance

Sentiment analysis and social media analytics API provider Repustate is providing a virtualized, portable, on-premise version of its API--adding a new twist to the concept of API deployment.

Using this new approach, Repustate is targeting the 5% of their user base who do not wish to transmit their data across the Internet, possibly because of legal or security concerns, and providing them with an on-premise version of their API, configured as a portable virtual appliance.

While the concept of on-premise vs cloud is nothing new, packaging up your API as a virtual appliance that can run anywhere is not that common. I'm investigating various, emerging approaches to deploying virtual containers that can assist API providers in providing portable versions of their valuable API resources.

At this point, I'm not sure how much demand there is for on-premise API resources, but I could see huge potential for the deployment of virtualized API stacks within a corporate firewall, enough that I will keep highlighting interesting approaches like Repustates, and providing blueprints for designing and deploying virtualized API containers and appliances.