Foreword

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are not new—we have heard about them, exposed them, and used them for decades. In the early days of APIs, they were little more than method calls made to functions exposed by developers for developers within a limited scope and to a very specific audience. Over the years, with the emergence of protocols, such as SOAP, Web Services established themselves as the standard to extend and leverage existing systems via interfaces exposed—arguably an evolution from APIs themselves.

As Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) went through the lifecycle from hype to reality, managing these services became extremely important, giving birth to the concept of SOA Governance. SOA Governance has evolved over the past few years as a rich, mature, and extensive approach to manage your service lifecycle from seed to runtime and analytics. SOA Governance has been used in several successful SOA projects around the world providing the much needed framework of well-defined roles, processes, and tools to manage and extend massive SOA projects across enterprises on the planet.

In the meanwhile, the Digital revolution continues to grow at a pace like never before. As we see every industry in the world being disrupted by technology—mobile, music, media, payments, hotels, and even the 300-year-old taxi industry—the importance of this revolution being grounded with a strong Integration layer becomes even more important. The promise of digitalization must invariably be backed by applications being able to discover and talk to each other while exposing themselves securely with an elevated user experience. This interactivity could be between applications residing in the same environment, across the planet in a cloud or on smart devices worn by you and me; there is no better way to expose and manage these than through a simple yet sophisticated API Management methodology and platform. API Management is no longer simply a buzzword in the technical world but a real strategic investment for businesses—exposing, leveraging, and even monetizing their APIs, whether for business or community—it is a reality today.

In many ways, API Management is an evolution of SOA Governance, but at the same time, a clearly independent approach. Yes, there is a strong overlap, and yet it does not undermine the importance of having a clear co-existence strategy with both.

In this book, the authors bring together these two exciting and extremely important paradigms in the application, services, and API space to the concept of Application Services Governance. I am confident that you will enjoy and be stimulated on this journey with Luis, Rolando, Arturo, and Andy as much as I have, through this book and through knowing Luis for years as a thought leader in the SOA Governance, API Management, and now the Application Services Governance space.

While all these concepts rely on your drive and vision to bring them to reality in your world, I hope that the knowledge you gain from this book enables you further to envision, lead, and execute your technology initiatives, whichever industry you are in, to the next level of innovation and success.

Vikas Anand

Vice President of Product Management, Oracle Service Integration & Oracle iPaaS, Oracle Corp.