In this talk I’d like to introduce the Scala-based API stack at Partner Innovation Group at Netflix. After seeing a massive growth in the business model and the device ecosystem, we needed a system that could scale and be flexible at the same time. Scala provided the answer and we started with a basic set of APIs which, since then, has evolved towards complex but flexible business flows. Supporting metadata for over hundreds of brands and thousands of devices, the API development has followed a well thought-out, test-driven approach, git-flow, and what most API developers dread – documentation. I will talk about the architecture of the RESTful APIs, and the development + deployment process. We use Netflix-OSS components heavily in the architecture and cloud deployment, so I will cover them as well.
Swagger is what we used for type-safe documentation, which is really easy to use and integrate. I will briefly talk about customizations we’ve done to Swagger in order to make it far more usable at Netflix.
Throughout this effort there were lessons to be learnt, and plenty of best practices and recommendations for anyone starting out to build RESTful APIs, regardless of the platform or stack of choice. It’d be a great opportunity for me to walk through the architecture, and talk about the various components, technologies, and practices that are seeing increasing adoption in the modern, API driven landscape.