apidays London 2023 - Breaking the Barriers to Reuse, John Phenix, HSBC

apidays London 2023 - APIs for Smarter Platforms and Business Processes
September 13 & 14, 2023

Breaking the Barriers to Reuse
John Phenix, Principal Platform Architect at HSBC

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Transcript

1. INTERNAL John Phenix Principal Platforms Architect, HSBC Breaking the Barriers to Reuse 1
2. INTERNAL Why Reuse is Important
3. INTERNAL The Promise of API Reuse Quality Reuse – go faster, cheaper and safer Productivity Cost Saves
4. INTERNAL The Reality Cost Complexity Hard Work Lack of reuse leads to a more complex and costly estate
5. INTERNAL Barriers to Reuse
6. INTERNAL Finding APIs is Hard Need a curated catalogue of all APIs to make discovery and reuse easier Reusing APIs is Hard Agreeing support, billing, changes, NFRs, volume etc… High Integration Costs Limited standardisation of API contracts results in complexity and increased cost of integration High Testing Costs Integration testing with downstream systems is high Technical Challenges
7. INTERNAL Delivery wins over Reuse Quality, reuse and risk is often overridden by delivery pressures Lack of Trust Don’t trust other teams to support them or prioritise their requirements Behaviour Challenges Lack of Incentives No benefits to offer an API for reuse, or to reuse an API from another team Projects not Products API estate reflects your organisation, leading to duplication across teams – Conway’s Law in practise
8. INTERNAL Curated API Catalogue
9. INTERNAL Reuse needs a curated catalogue - not just an inventory Contains details of all APIs. Whether they are private or reusable; good or bad. Useful for estate management. Curated Catalogue Recommended Lists API Inventory Contains a smaller curated subset of the inventory. Only reusable APIs that are “good” and organised by function. Contains manually and AI generated recommendations for specific requirements.
10. INTERNAL “Organised” books If you went into a library and the books weren’t sorted into sections but were piled in the middle of the floor – would you take the time to search through them to find a book, or just go to a bookshop and buy a new one? Too many APIs and no organisation in your catalogue puts people off reusing them as it takes too long to find an API
11. INTERNAL “Good” books Do you expect to see old, shabby books in the library. You expect to only see books that meet a certain standard Poor quality APIs in your catalogue puts people off reusing them. Bad experiences last longer than good ones
12. INTERNAL How to build a curated API catalogue You need an accurate inventory to start with Automated discovery of APIs You need to remove the “bad” assets Automated recommendation engine You need to map the “good” assets by function AI mapping to functional domain models
13. INTERNAL Changing Behaviours
14. INTERNAL I could build a better API than them! Can I trust them to let me know about breaking changes? Trust issues between API consumers and producers API Consumer API Producer I will rely on this API, can I trust that the API will be supported? Will my change requests get prioritised? Can I trust them to pay for support and change? Can I trust that they won’t escalate at the first problem? Will they use all my capacity?
15. INTERNAL https://ncase.me/trust/
16. INTERNAL How to build trust between API consumers and producers – lessons from game theory Build Relationships Win-Win Communicate Clearly Trust keeps a relationship going, but you need knowledge of possible future repeat interactions before trust can evolve You must be playing a non-zero-sum game, a game where it’s at least possible that both players can be better off – a win-win If the level of miscommunication is too high, trust breaks down • Prod availability, performance & error rates • Change History & Prioritisation • Support SLAs • Incentives for API consumers & producers • Internal billing to recover run and change costs • Deprecation & versioning strategy • Clear capacity & NFRs information • Reuse champions
17. INTERNAL Lessons Learnt… Reuse doesn’t happen by chance it needs to be planned for Treat internal APIs as Products, consumers as customers Consider the cultural barriers to reuse not just technical Incentives for API consumers and producers Automate everything! Curate your API catalogue so “good” APIs are easier to find