Why Should Businesses Adopt Serverless APIs?

What is Serverless Computing?

Serverless computing involves a provider offering backed services to a client on an as used basis. The client concentrates on writing and deploying code and leaves the management of the underlying architecture to the provider.

The client does not pay a fixed amount of money for the servers or bandwidth in use but pays based on the computation that they use since the service auto-scales. However, this does not mean that there are no physical servers, it is only that the client does not need to know about them.

When it comes to APIs, the wrong architecture can bring a lot of problems not only to certain applications but also to the entire company. Things such as poor performance, downtime, and complexity of applications can lead to loss of revenue and high operational costs.

Image Source: https://pixabay.com/photos/network-server-system-2402637/

Serverless APIs have, however, made it possible for businesses to avoid such issues by automatically scaling capabilities with pricing models based on consumption. This, together with the reasons outlined below, makes it important for businesses to adopt serverless APIs.

Faster Marketing Time

Using a serverless infrastructure to run microservices by modernizing the application stack of a business helps in reducing internal complexities and decreasing the time a business takes to develop new products or features.

A microservice is implemented by every serverless function. Developers can therefore build the microservices into integrated applications by using a single API product with many functions. With the integrated applications, they can make sure that they meet security requirements as well as implement caching using the API management product.

They can then implement OpenAPIs or other third-party services for monitoring and observation. Those that would like to convert their APIs to OpenAPIs can use the APITransform tool that allows them to upload their Postman collection then does the conversion for them.

Using Modern Infrastructure

Businesses should relieve their developers from the burden of managing and provisioning infrastructure. This will help in keeping them focussed solely on the development and implementation of APIs.

Serverless API management comes with an API gateway that offers a fully managed and centralized entry point used by backend services. With this, developers are able to manage, secure, publish, and analyze APIs.

Further, organizations can focus on innovation and optimize resources through the use of serverless functions together with API gateways. For instance, a serverless function will give an online store an API that they can use to adjust their inventory in case an item is out of stock.

Accelerating Innovation Using APIs

The primary reasons businesses are adopting serverless APIs revolve around decreasing operational costs, increasing revenue, and improving business agility. This makes technology one of the key drivers in the growth of a business. Businesses can therefore use APIs without interruptions to collect customer data and analyze it to get insights into customer behavior.

This way, the businesses will be able to tailor experiences that match the requirements of their users. They can also use the same insights to predict future customer behavior to make sure that they can adapt quickly with changing requirements. This means that businesses can easily optimize their sales cycle with serverless APIs.

Finally, with API first infrastructures and the APIs themselves getting increasingly dominant, developers and businesses are adopting serverless platforms for hosting APIs and applications for them to reap these benefits. In the near future, about half of businesses globally will have deployed serverless functions for their API operations.