Who is Creating Public and Web APIs?

API or application programming interface is one of the most essential tools for a programmer’s life. But, many people are still confused about creating and using them in the best manner.

In this article, we will be exploring all about using and creating public APIs.

But before knowing how to create them, let us have a quick look at what they are.

What is a Public or Open API?

An open Application Programming interface is made publicly available to the software developers. They are shared and published on the open web freely, which allows the network-accessible service to give universal access to users.

How to Build an Open API?

There are many ways to develop a public API, and before creating one, you need to take care of a few factors to ensure the public API is secure, simple, and scalable.

Programmers usually turn to adopt API standards that have the necessary tools, documentation, frameworks, and community support. Here, GraphQL and REST are popular standards for building APIs.

Developers working on AWS or amazon web services have solutions classified broadly into two categories, built or fully managed.

Examples of fully managed services include AWS AppSync for GraphQL APIs and Amazon API gateway for REST APIs. They use the most widely accepted features and offer a great option, and you can build secure, scalable, and simple APIs with minimal effort.

Various other AWS components can also be sued to build APIs like Load balancers and Compute as the building blocks to host the service.

You can use many open-source language-specific frameworks that you can host using these building blocks on AWS. Thus, hosting or building an open-source framework provides much more flexibility and control but causes the added operational burden of managing the infrastructure yourself.

Although to avoid undifferentiated heavy lifting, it is highly recommended to use a fully managed service for building an API.

AP gateway uses REST-based APIs, which makes it simpler for programmers to publish, maintain, create, monitor, and secure API at any scale or volume.

API gateway gives the developers an option to build multi-tenant systems using monitoring, request throttling, tracing, and logging.

If you need to build GraphQL-based APIs, it is recommended to use AppSync, a managed service using GraphQL to enable applications to get precisely the data they need.AppSync can be used to create scalable applications with real-time updates on a range of sources such as NoSQL data stores, HTTP APIs, relational databases, and your AWS Lambda.

AppSync and API Gateway both have different users ranging from a few hundred to millions with no need to make configuration and code changes. Both enhance the developer experience by making the back-end services’ integration process more straightforward.

Conclusion

Startups and small business owners usually require the ability to build simple, secure, and scalable open APIs.

The options we have discussed above fulfill this need for them quite sufficiently. Features lie in the ability to generate SDKs in multiple programming languages and also contribute to making this experience better.

You can use all these tools to build your first API quickly! Happy Coding!

Other useful articles: