There’s a lot of talk about migrating applications to the cloud and managing the cloud’s performance, but what exactly does this mean? While we seem to be entering an era of “everything-as-a-service,” cloud services are typically divided into three broad categories: software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and platform as a service (PaaS).
SaaS was one of the first cloud solutions to hit the market. It provides the ability to consume information through a browser or API. IT teams don’t have to manage applications, hardware, security, or storage; the vendor manages everything. Users subscribe to a SaaS service on a recurring basis and can easily scale. There are SaaS solutions for every function and department within an organization. Thousands of SaaS applications are on the market today covering everything from managing social media posts to video conferencing to obtaining signatures on contracts.
As distributed systems evolved, so did the need for protocols that would act as a common platform for communication among independent systems. The introduction of HTTP as the data communication protocol underpinning the web paved the way for processes that enabled disparate applications to talk to each other. Application Programming Interfaces or APIs provided the building blocks for such processes.
So, what are API's?
As distributed systems evolved, so did the need for protocols that would act as a common platform for communication among independent systems. The introduction of HTTP as the data communication protocol underpinning the web paved the way for processes that enabled disparate applications to talk to each other. Application Programming Interfaces or APIs provided the building blocks for such processes.