While the pace of business change is never slow, many observers note that the current economic downturn, far from slowing the pace of innovation, is certain to increase the pace of change within many sectors. The growing attention given to "cloud computing" is one example of economic constraints driving such change.

In recent a post, I promised I'd address the relationship between standards and APIs. A broad assertion that I believe holds up fairly well, is that standards are not APIs, but that ideally good standards figure into what makes a good API. As I write this post, I notice that IBM's Bob Sutor has put up a post on his blog describing issues with the proliferation of APIs that fall short on measures of "compatibility," "interoperability," or "interchangeability." Bob writes:

With cloud computing becoming more and more important, people are correctly asking questions about standards. My sense is that virtually none of the cloud environments are interchangeable and that interoperability among them is sketchy, at best. Unless one provider ends up being overwhelmingly dominant, interoperability will need to be improved.

Many would agree that standards potentially have a very important role to play in leveraging capabilities from the cloud. However, many also would agree that there are significant obstacles to realizing anything like standards-based cloud computing.

The Challenge for Standards Development Organizations

Along with the growing cloud-computing hype is growing push back along the lines that cloud-computing is merely a new way for vendors to pitch the same offerings wrapped up in the latest buzzword. Shally Steckerl, a recruiting strategist and consultant, delivers a blistering post along these lines on ERE.net.

It is easy to sympathize with Shalley and other users of HR services who see new buzzwords advance in vendor marketing campaigns often at a pace more rapid than functional improvements or efficiencies evident in the vendor offerings themselves. However, vendor marketing hype aside, cloud computing is (or should be), more than a re-branding of existing SAAS or ASP offerings.

As I mentioned in my previously post, there isn't unanimity about what cloud computing is. However, most associate the phrase with an approach in which IT or business capabilities are accessed as services through publicly available (or readily available) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). While HR abounds with SAAS providers, there aren't many that arguably fit the cloud model. Most HR service providers today simply don't have the well-defined APIs. There are companies that likely have a head start such as ADP Employease and Workday (links to API pages). However, contrary to what Shalley says in his rant and vendor hype aside, the cloud model is quite new and is distinct from mere SAAS and ASP offerings.

Everyday there is more written and presented about what makes a good API.

In recent years, much discussion related to APIs has focused on architectural approach (e.g., SOAP-based web services vs. RESTful ones) or even how a specific approach (like REST) is best applied. Beyond all the blog-blather about APIs (this post included among the blather), there also is an increasing number of market metrics as to the type of APIs, as well as the particular APIs, that are gaining the most adoption.

Some of the metrics come from the API publishers themselves. For example, a key data point frequently cited with regard to Amazon web services (offered in both SOAP and RESTful configurations) is that 20 percent of the usage is SOAP, while 80 percent is REST. There also are a few independent sources of information about API usage. SOA analyst and born-again cloud-computing evangelist David Lithicum highlighted in one of his recent podcasts the website Programmableweb.com, which provides a directory of, and community feedback on, more than 1,000 APIs.

What Makes a Good API?

I won't try to recreate the aforementioned blog blather about what makes a good API, but if you want to be spoon-fed a good, high-level introduction on this topic there really are few better sources than the webcast embedded below (also available here) by Joshua Bloch, a senior software engineer and architect at Google. This is a high-level review of technical design principles. I have a follow-up regarding one of Bloch's early statements in the webcast about API's as "business assets," which I'll get to below the embed.

The non-profit National Bureau of Economic Research officially announced on Monday what everyone has known for a long time - that the U.S. economy is in a recession. As the economy and stock market spiraled downward over the past year, at least one thing on the rise was "Cloud Computing" as a technology meme. (Of course, the phrase "technology meme" is favored since it sounds so much better than "hype" ;-> ) As is the case with these technology memes, the definition of the particulars is seldom precise. However, the reason for the increased number of conversations around cloud computing is easy to understand -- Under current economic conditions, flexible, Internet-accessible technology and services are going to be in many cases much more attractive alternatives to building, buying, or managing infrastructure or business capabilities directly.

As the phrase is broadly used, "cloud computing" encompasses concepts such as "software as a service" (last year's meme?). However, you also see the concept used in a narrower sense to refer to a style of computing in which IT-related capabilities are accessed as services through publicly available APIs. These services can fulfill basic infrastructure needs such as storage or virtual servers (Amazon's S3 and EC2 being the best-known examples) or they can provide conceivably any other type of business functionality ranging from something tiny and specific (an address validation service) to something like the Force.com Platform that enables a wide-range of complex business functionality/capability to be built on top of the main Salesforce application.

But of course, none to which I refer is new. The architectural approaches are not new and neither are the services that I mention as examples. What is new is wrapping these up within the cloud computing meme.

Beyond the Hype, A New Focus on APIs