An API, or application programming interface, enables different applications to communicate with each other seamlessly while maintaining security. APIs are becoming increasingly important in today’s digital landscape, enabling businesses to integrate different software solutions, automate processes, and improve overall efficiency.
APIs are essential building blocks enabling applications to communicate seamlessly and securely with other applications and services. However, APIs alone still require work to build integrated workflows between systems. While many enterprises have integration platform as a service (iPaaS) platforms to build workflows, this puts the onus on each customer to build the integrations they want. While this is valuable for many customers, others may not have the time, expertise, budget or desire to build their own integrations using your API.
Workato’s Embedded platform unlocks a lot of possibilities for product organizations by enabling them to build automations and integrations for their applications in a scalable, secure, and rapid manner. Our clients are able to deploy these tools to their customer base, allowing for streamlined processes and enhanced functionality within the application. Well-designed APIs are imperative to the success of an embedded iPaas (Integration Platform as a Service) strategy. For this reason, it is important to evaluate whether the API is suitable enough to support an embedded solution. Here are some key factors to consider when determining API readiness for embedded solutions:
Authentication:
Transfer of customer data across systems in embedded integrations calls for consistent and reliable data stewardship practices. Strong authentication and access management protocols are integral components of a secure and stable API and provide a solid foundation for maintaining the integrity of integrations and protecting sensitive data. Authentication measures built with precise access control mechanisms can help APIs handle data requests from multiple customers while preventing security vulnerabilities, unauthorized access attempts, data breaches/cross-contamination of customer data and maintaining performance.
Recommendation: Embedded-ready APIs should use industry-standard authentication protocols, such as OAuth or JSON Web Tokens (JWT). These protocols are widely adopted and are reliable choices for securing APIs, thereby safeguarding the integrity and confidentiality of users and their data for use in integrations.
Endpoints for Batch/Bulk Requests:
Bulk/batch endpoints can optimize performance in integrations that deal with large amounts of data. These endpoints can allow multiple rows of data to be processed in a single request, which can significantly reduce the number of API calls made by customers. This approach can reduce server load, network traffic and increase scalability. Bulk endpoints can also reduce costs for you and your customers.
Bulk/batch endpoints can especially be valuable for use cases like data syncs, where a significant amount of data needs to be transferred between systems in one single request. This can benefit end customers as processing data in bulk can be quick and can reduce delays in business operations.
Recommendation: Perform an evaluation and determine which endpoints are frequently used by downstream users and design relevant batch/bulk endpoints for the use cases where batch processing is beneficial. We often recommend companies enable bulk processing for creates/updates/deletions of records and upserts to minimize the record look-up transactions before writing. These use cases help with scalability and reduce the number of transactions or tasks required per event.
Performance Considerations:
Workato embedded can enable fast adoption of integrations within an organization’s customer base. However, small performance issues in APIs can quickly add up and cause problems for the many customers who rely on these integrations. API optimization based on certain metrics can mitigate potential issues and help make the APIs more efficient in terms of response times, data retrieval and latency. Some potential measures that can be implemented for optimization include:
Pagination: This method breaks up large datasets into smaller, more manageable chunks. It enables faster data retrieval, thereby increasing the API’s responsiveness and usability when retrieving a lot of information.
Caching: Caching stores frequently accessed data across several places in the request-response path, reducing the need for repetitive data fetches. This results in faster response times and less resource usage.
Recommendation: Perform load testing to identify bottlenecks and understand the API’s behavior at different stress levels. Incorporate pagination, caching, and other asynchronous processing measures to drive API performance, scalability and better user experience.
Error Management:
Error management is crucial for maintaining an API’s performance and reliability. Effective error handling allows for monitoring and analyzing error logs and metrics, which can help provide valuable insights into common customer issues and enable ongoing enhancements. These practices also help users/developers understand and address errors promptly, improving the overall reliability and ease of use of an API.
Recommendation: To facilitate efficient error handling, we advise our clients to utilize standardized HTTP status codes for the identification and classification of errors. These codes can aid in the creation of error-handling logic in integrations. Additionally, error responses that provide meaningful information, such as error codes, messages, and relevant details, can enable end-users to troubleshoot and resolve issues more effectively.
Service Level Agreement (SLA):
An API Service-Level Agreement (SLA) defines the expected performance and availability of an API and sets targets/constraints around measures such as response times, uptimes and error rates. These agreements play a crucial role in guaranteeing the reliability and consistency of an API as they help establish clear expectations regarding their availability in integrations. This greatly minimizes the occurrences and effects of unplanned downtimes and disruptions on customers and their business processes.
Recommendation: Ensuring that a well-defined SLA is provided with the API helps manage customers when building embedded integrations. Some common KPI targets and thresholds that can be included in SLAs are response times, uptime percentage, error rates, throughput and data transfer limits. Establishing clear, realistic and achievable targets and communicating them transparently can help manage relationships and conflicting expectations and relationships.
The factors and recommendations above are a beginning point in the API assessment process, but there are many more things to understand when designing APIs to scale. At Dispatch, we understand the significant role an API plays in shaping the foundation of embedded solutions and integrations. We can help your organization assess your API’s capabilities and provide further guidance and support on how to optimize your API for customer integrations. Contact us today to learn more about how our company can assist you in evaluating and optimizing your API in preparation for an embedded iPaaS strategy.