API Development
Modern applications are complex. Complex frontends must interact with complex backends. These interactions are handled through APIs that the backends expose. One of the most common forms of these APIs are restful APIs that leverage common HTTP verbs sent to meaningful URIs.
There are multiple moving parts here and it's not uncommon to have multiple teams working on these parts. There might be one team building the frontend that consumes these APIs and another that builds the APIs. Or it could be one team with multiple people working on the frontend and backend in parallel. In either case, you have multiple people involved in the development of the overall application.
How do you keep them aligned through the development? One of the best ways is by exercising strong design first principles with the creation of specifications that define the contract of the APIs that are going to be consumed. OpenAPI provides a well adopted language for doing so. It standardizes how you represent APIs.
December 3, 2024 | 6 min read
API Development
API development might seem daunting for students venturing into the tech world, but with the right tools, it’s an incredibly rewarding skill to master.
Enter Blackbird, the API development platform designed to simplify the process. Whether you're working on a class project, a hackathon, or a personal side hustle, Blackbird equips you with everything you need to create, test, and refine APIs—all in one place.
Blackbird has generated a lot of engagement from the education sector for higher-ed professionals and students alike (no, it’s not going to just do your coding assignments for you!). This interest spurred us to think about some of the use cases Blackbird would excel at in an education environment. I covered a few of the main ones below, but really as it relates to Blackbird, there are endless possibilities for students including:
December 2, 2024 | 7 min read
API Development
API creation is essential for building scalable and efficient applications. Coupled with API mocking, developers can accelerate API development cycles and test applications without waiting for backend services. In this guide, I will provide you with a comprehensive overview of creating APIs from scratch and setting up API mocking to simulate API endpoints early in the development process.
What is API CreationAPI creation is the process of designing, building, and deploying APIs that allow software applications to communicate and share data seamlessly. This process involves defining endpoints, setting request and response formats, and implementing security measures to ensure reliable data exchange. Effective API creation enables developers to build scalable, flexible applications by providing standardized methods for applications to interact, whether within a single system or across multiple platforms.
API Creation and Its Key Benefits
November 29, 2024 | 9 min read
Kubernetes API Gateway
EKS clusterAWS (Amazon Web Services) is a cloud platform offering over 200 products across various technologies. Among them is Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), a tool for orchestrating containers.
Kubernetes is a platform for managing and deploying containerized applications. It is often used with container engines like Docker, CRI-O, and Containerd to enhance control over application deployment.
In this article, you’ll explore the Amazon EKS architecture and learn two ways to deploy a Kubernetes cluster on AWS — through the AWS console and from your local machine.
November 27, 2024 | 9 min read
API Development
Much like the rainbow road level in the popular Mario Kart games, the API development world is getting more and more complex. How do you power up your dev team to complete each level faster and better? Let’s get into the top five “cheat codes” that will put your dev team in the winner’s circle.
From design through testing, this blog will share how to give developers ultimate control over the development process, pursue spec-first development, and remove infrastructure obstacles from impeding the advancement of your API strategy.
If you’re more of a listener than a reader, you can watch my 2024 API world talk on the same topic below.
November 26, 2024 | 19 min read
Kubernetes API Gateway
What is gRPC?
gRPC is an RPC protocol built on HTTP/2 (gRPC Remote Procedure Calls) and is an open-source, high-performance framework developed by Google that allows communication between applications or services. It's particularly popular for microservices and distributed systems because of its efficiency, scalability, and support for multiple languages. We’re seeing more and more companies move their APIs from HTTP/JSON to gRPC. gRPC offers several benefits over HTTP/JSON:
Performance. gRPC uses HTTP/2, with support for streaming, multiplexing, and more (see the difference in action). In addition, gRPC has native support for protobuf, which is much faster at serialization/deserialization than JSON.
November 25, 2024 | 4 min read
