Summary: APIs are programming interfaces—they are an interface abstraction that invite users to leverage software solutions. This article attempts to draw an analogy with light switches to explain this and to illustrate important aspects of digital transformation.
Nowadays, a light switch is a common user interface that offers a simple control over a vast amount of power. But in 1891, when the White House was just 100 years old, the first electric lights were installed. President Benjamin Harrison and his wife, Caroline, were afraid of getting shocked, so they had their staff turn on and off the lights for them (a human proxy, if you will).
This is so common now that you probably used several switches already today. Each one was likely to have been installed by a professional electrician, because electricity is just as dangerous as it was in 1891. But that kind of work is expensive. And if you get it wrong, it is hard to change.
While many rooms have built-in light fixtures, lamps often complement them. Lamps can be positioned wherever you might need a little extra light. One obvious trade-off is that you have a visible cord, and you need to be close to an electrical socket. (In the US, that’s likely a 2-prong or 3-prong interface, but there are different interface standards around the world.)
If you were to walk by my house at night and it was dark, you might guess that no one was home. A vacant house is a higher risk than an occupied one! So when I go away on vacation, I plug a lamp into a light timer and the light timer into the socket. The timer then controls when power gets delivered to the lamp, turning on the light according to a schedule. Now the timer acts as a proxy—it is middle-ware that controls when power gets sent to the lamp. (Just remember to check that the lamp’s switch is set to on, since the local control takes precedence!)
Because a ceiling fixture is hard-wired to its power source, it is harder to schedule than a lamp. But you can upgrade a physical switch to a smart switch to add a network interface to the physical one. This means you can control the flow of power to the fixture without having to touch it (a digital transformation). Then you can use the network interface to schedule on/off and simulate presence in your house.
But that’s not all! Now you can control your lights in ways that were not possible before! For example, you can:
- Automation: set the on/off schedule around the sunrise in your location
- Integration: connect it to your Google Home or Alexa and use your voice to control it
- Extensibility: add a second switch to the other side of the room without having to physically run a wire to that location (easier, cheaper, and more flexible)
- Orchestration: control multiple lights and/or other devices at once, such as preset scenes that set light levels for dinner or for watching a movie with one command
An electrician already has the skills to install a smart switch, but switch manufacturers had a new engineering challenge in order to create the digital interfaces. How can you secure access? Who will manage new business opportunities and partnerships? How do you improve reliability or responsiveness? How will you on-board developers and support them?
You might ask, "How does this relate to Apigee, API management, and digital transformation?"
Apigee makes smart switches for smart switches. Just like Lutron makes light switches that an electrician can install, Apigee provides API gateways to standardize and manage the API requests to a service. You do not have to be an expert in APIs or networking to add them.
Beyond the technical implementation of managing the API traffic at runtime, Apigee is a system that enables API providers to create API products that package up functionality to meet specific needs of developer-customers and to have visibility and control over that on-going relationship.
And this is where things get interesting… because while an API is a technical product, it also usually represents an on-going relationship between API consumers and API producers. APIs sit in socio-technical space—there is technical work to be done, but they intersect with human factors as relationships form and change over time.
When an organization has many teams publishing APIs for many other teams to consume, it is realizing the benefits of scaling the impact of the investments it has made in services. When their internal APIs are thriving in such a system, it makes it easier to offer external API products that leverage those internal services. Such an organization has thus made significant progress on their digital transformation journey.
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