Microservices Vs. APIs: Highlighting the Major Differences

These days incorporating digital transformation in a business stands for shifting the traditional business process to a new digital platform, which is trending worldwide. It cannot be overlooked that the covid-19 pandemic has turned up serving as the boosting era for such a sudden trend of adopting the digital phase among businesses.

Whenever you come across digital transformation, the very first thing that comes into your concern is moving the critical business data and processes to the cloud platform. Now you have guessed that right! However, this digital transformation can be even termed as shifting processes to private or on-premises network-based software solutions.

When planning to develop mission-critical digital fixes, many business leaders encounter difficulties in understanding and adopting the right software product engineering method. And this comprises whether to make use of the API integration technique or microservices architecture to develop a full-grown software product.

Some even have confusion about whether APIs and Microservices are just simple concepts or something complex. Now that is definitely a debatable and serious concept that needs to be discussed in detail. This blog thereby aims to guide you about the differences between APIs and Microservices, how reliant they are on each other, and many more.

What does a Microservice refer to?

Just like their name, microservices look like they represent a very small action development segment. But it is, in reality, a broad development topic that covers some vital in-depth development keys for building an optimized, full-fledged as well as secure software solution.

Work experience with Microservices- A very controversial topic among the developers

The word Microservices technically refers to the approach of driving the application development into self-contained, granular services that are coded in various programming languages interacting over some lightweight protocols.

With Microservices, developers, and businesses having the privilege of selecting programming languages by not just being limited to a specific technology stack, developers can easily develop software reliably and interactively, benefitting from quick software time to market as flexible upgrade releases.

Some of the well-known Microservices- based software products

With growing knowledge about software development based on microservices, here are some of the well-known software applications developed using the microservices architecture.

Why is it important for a business to lay importance on developing Microservices?

Witnessing microservices with a Monolithic software development framework is the most reliable practice to completely get an idea and value the importance of Microservices architecture in large software and mission-critical development.

The advantages of using Microservices in the field of software development as mentioned below:

Best practices for product development based on Microservices

To make your microservices-based software development quite effective, you have to adhere to the best practices for microservices development.

• Go ahead with a Domain-Driven Design i.e., DDD, by simply taking its strategic phase i.e., business capability architecture, as well as the tactical phase i.e., application domain model, into concern for boosting the development productivity.
• Incorporate the SRP or Single Responsibility principle for reducing dependencies to deal with all new failures or requests.
• Take up creating a data persistence layer for each of the microservice related to the application.
• Promote the application component parallelism with effective asynchronous communication.
• Incorporate the API gateway request transformation plugin to encounter the broken APIs and alert the API owners with some deprecation notices and original API responses.
• Run the microservices architecture in Kubernetes or the VMs to obtain a completely centralized hub for enforcing security policies.

What is known as an API?

API refers to Application Programming Interface- a part of a software interface, an application, or a protocol defining ways for two applications to effectively communicate, modify each other’s data, and serve any other purposes as required. APIs are even referred to as software solutions that focus on a specific service.

Speaking technically, APIs are stored and implemented between the software’s core components and the app’s front-end interface.

In order to grant your software the potential to perform a specific task or hire that functionality from any third-party service dealer, developers have to build the APIs or integrate any 3rd party APIs with their desirable software solutions. In situations where developers have to integrate a 3rd party API, you have to refer to a high-level API reference document, along with the guidelines or best practices offered by the owners.

Different types of APIs

You will come across APIs that are built for different types of applications. However, there are mostly 2 main types of APIs. These are as follows:

Relevant and Most Used API Design Styles

There are innumerable API design styles that are available today in the market, but these are some of the popular ones among developers today:

• REST APIs refer to Representational State Transfer APIs built exclusively from the REST framework with the sole purpose of cross-platform integration. All these APIs can even be implemented in microservices. The REST APIs effectively work on the HTTP requests and represent findings in the JSON format.
• SOAP APIs refer to Simple Object Access Protocol APIs, which permit processes using the Operating System, such as Windows and Linux, to communicate adhering to the XML and HTTP formats. By skillfully integrating this API with your application, your solution will be able to create, drop, update, and recover records such as login credentials and profiles.
• GraphQL APIs offer you stable and faster predictable results in a very organized way on your highlighted queries since they have sound access to every application data source point, including when your device’s internet connection is running slow.

The Function of APIs in The Software Development

APIs are one of the most versatile tools that help in building your mission-critical applications allowing developers to:

APIs are meant to lift the usefulness of all your services and make the service distribution even easier. Therefore, you can commit to providing granular services.

Taking the APIs into concern as a product processing alongside a significant developer portal, developers are well informed about all the usages of the APIs with effective access to any API key. The developer portal will be able to demonstrate:

As you are well aware of today’s two important topics, it is time to dive into the basic difference between the APIs and Microservices.

How are APIs different from Microservices?

As you get to see Microservices and APIs have numerous similarities and are often used together in the process of development architecture, thereby comparing them can be slightly misleading. Now, why are we telling this? It is time to get an idea about this appeal via their definitions:

Microservices refer to a software development approach that breaks development into minute modular components, while the APIs are just like an application communication tool that enables cross-application communications. Thereby, in both fact, fully and tactfully, APIs assist developers to energize and trigger microservices for building a resilient mission-critical application.

Just like an application using external APIs for integrating with numerous other public APIs, each of the microservices components has its private API for gaining access to various microservices frameworks or architectural components.

Point to Note- Remember that none of the microservices are similar. Thus all microservices come with their unique, different APIs. APIS comes with various pros to microservices since APIs let inter-system data sharing, which is important for many applications. And the APIs are also referred to as the lone wolf since, unlike microservices, APIs do not need support from any microservice at the time of implementation.

This is why comparison APIs and Microservices highlight these parameters to estimate their differences:

The Effect of APIs on The Microservices

API is an application communication tool enabling effective communication between 2 services. Talking of reality, even though the APIs are an essentially effective service package, they also require to be effectively integrated with many other microservices or services to become highly useful. These could be:

Most worthy practices for Microservices Management Using the APIS

The most worthy thing about APIs and microservices is that they can both be used together, and the pattern of the same is mentioned below:

Employing the Software Development Revolution

Many people are today thinking of dividing the software implementation task into small parts, such as Microservices components and APIs- a modern and trendy approach. However, in reality, this kind of software architecture has been followed extensively by numerous leading digital service providers such as Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, and others.

The synergy of microservices and APIs is welcoming a change in the software development approach and its stakeholders’ collaborations with added efficiency. The software implementation development may charge more, but it is worth it to avail of the most stable, reliable, resilient, secure, and faster IT solution.

If you are looking for more expert views on how to effectively optimize your software development, get in touch with me now!

Expert mobile and web application developers can assist you in skilfully defining your application development needs within the budget you have in mind.