Change is a feature
The evolution of APIs
In a networked world, APIs progressing is a feature not a bug. However, this does have the side effect of being forced to change your code as the APIs change or drift. This can be wildly frustrating, especially as applications get larger. Large microservice applications may have hundreds or even thousands of API connections. While some APIs may be internal in which a release & deprecation plan can be thought out internally, most enterprises likely have several hundred Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS) dependencies in which they have no control over. Typically, there is a grace period for the upgrading to the latest SaaS and PaaS versions, but this can be infuriating for developers to waste several hundred hours a year just keeping up with the changes and ensuring things don’t break throughout millions of lines of code and integration tests. They’d much rather be building momentum on their own code bases — implementing features their customer’s want.
The solution
When we started building network-native technology 10 years ago, we recognized that progress was the purpose of networked software. While web technologies have changed dramatically over the last decade, good processes have changed very little. To codify industry standard best practices and process we built change resilience and self-healing directly into each N Lang framework, particularly in the API & automation framework Raconteur.
Raconteur’s name means “storyteller”, a perfect name for a framework that creates stories out of automations and creates “history as code” for APIs. Raconteur makes wrapping internal and external APIs in evolving code simple, which means the complexity of API maintenance is greatly reduced. In fact, Raconteur transformers can gracefully and intelligently use multiple API versions simultaneously, making the headaches of API changes all but disappear.
More than maintenance
Additionally, anything built for Raconteur becomes a new shortcut for anything else in Raconteur. This means that when you create one API transformer, it is instantly available to your team to use elsewhere. Raconteur inherits this ability from N Lang, the network-native technology created by Squillo that creates shortcuts of shortcuts.
The future
If you’re tired of wasting time on SaaS and PaaS API maintenance and need a more reliable solution, Raconteur is the framework you’ve been waiting for. One of the best features of network-native technology is that you can adopt a little or a lot, and still feel the advantages instantly. So what are you waiting for?