• The “IDC MaturityScape: Digital Transformation Platforms 1.0” report states that 71% of organizations expect to see the volume of API calls increase in the next 2 years. 59% of organizations expect the latency of a typical API request to be under 20 milliseconds, and 93% expect a latency under 50 milliseconds.
• According to the same report, 90% of new applications being built will feature a microservice architecture, and 35% of all production applications will be “cloud native.”
• To meet the increasing demand placed on API-based systems, there are three areas for consideration: architecting for performance, monitoring for performance, and managing for performance.
• Good architectural practices include avoiding a simple “lift and shift” to the cloud, embracing asynchronous processing, and reengineering data and networks.
• Understanding a system and the resulting performance, and being able to identify bottlenecks, is critical to meeting performance targets. Services must also be monitored, both from an operational perspective (SLIs), and also a business perspective (KPIs).

In a recent apidays webinar, Mike Amundsen, trainer and author of the recent O’Reilly book API Traffic Management 101, presented “High Performing APIs: Architecting for Speed at Scale.” Drawing on recent research by IDC, he argued that organizations will have to drive systemic changes to meet the upcoming increased demand for consumption of business services via APIs. This change in requirements relates to both an increased scale of operation and a decreased response time.

The changing nature of customer expectations, combined with new data-driven products and an increase in consumption at the edge (mobile, IoT, etc.), has meant that the need for low latency “real-time APIs” is rapidly becoming the norm.

The recent adoption of cloud technology and microservices-based architecture has enabled innovation and increased speed of development throughout the business world.

The performance imperative

Amundsen began his presentation by describing the “performance imperative” he is seeing throughout the IT industry. Focusing first on the ecosystem transformation, he referenced a 2019 IDC research report “IDC MaturityScape: Digital Transformation Platforms 1.0.” This report states that 75% of organizations will be completely digitally transformed in the next decade, with those companies not embracing a modern way of working not surviving. By 2022, 90% of new applications being built will feature a microservice architecture, and 35% of all production applications will be “cloud native.”

API call volumes are increasing as more organizations embrace digital transformations. According to the same report, 71% of organizations expect to see the volume of API calls increase in the next 2 years. About 60% expect over 250 million API calls per month (~10 million per business day). There is an increasing focus on transaction response time, with 59% of organizations expecting the latency of a typical API request to be under 20 milliseconds, and 93% expecting a latency under 50 milliseconds.

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