Azure Pipelines is the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) solution for any language, application, or platform. Independent Software Vendors can use it for both enhanced CI/CD functionality, and as a dedicated CI/CD service to use in their DevOps toolchains.
A continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipeline has become an important aspect of API development. It allows organisations like ISVs, to automate deployment of changes without manual steps, detect issues earlier, and ultimately deliver value to end users faster.
Azure DevOps provides the CI/CD pipeline, starting with a Git repository for managing your application source code and infrastructure code (Azure Resource Manager templates), a Built system for producing packages and other built artefacts, and a Release Management system for setting up a pipeline to deploy your changes through dev, test and production environments.
Application Programming Interfaces have become the default case for connecting apps, data, and services. APIs are driving digital transformation for many ISVs.
A REST API is an application programming interface that conforms to specific architectural constraints. Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs are service endpoints that support sets of HTTP operations (methods), which provide create, retrieve, update, or delete access to the service’s resources.
With the wrong architecture, APIs can be a bottleneck to applications, this can take the form of downtime, low performance, or high application complexity. These bottlenecks can lead to exaggerated infrastructure and organizational costs and lost revenue. Serverless APIs mitigate these bottlenecks with autoscaling capabilities and consumption-based pricing models.
Given the increasing dominance of APIs, companies and developers are gravitating towards serverless platforms to host APIs and API-first applications to realize these benefits. One serverless compute option to host API’s is Azure Functions, event-triggered code that can scale on-demand, and you only pay for what you use. Gartner predicts that 50 percent of global enterprises will have deployed a serverless functions platform by 2025, up from only 20 percent today. You can publish Azure Functions through API Management to secure, transform, maintain, and monitor your serverless APIs.
Modernizing your application stack to run microservices on a serverless platform decreases internal complexity and reduces the time it takes to develop new features. Each serverless function implements a microservice. By adding many functions to a single API Management product, you can build those microservices into an integrated distributed application. Once the application is built, you can use API Management policies to implement caching or ensure security requirements.
Developers should be focusing on developing applications, not provisioning and managing infrastructure. API management provides a serverless API gateway that delivers a centralized, fully managed entry point for serverless backend services. It enables developers to publish, manage, secure, and analyze APIs on at global scale. Using serverless functions and API gateways together allows ISVs to better optimize resources and stay focused on innovation.
Serverless APIs are used to either increase revenue, decrease cost, or improve business agility. As a result, technology becomes a key driver of business growth. ISVs can leverage artificial intelligence to analyze API calls to recognize patterns and predict future purchase behavior, thus optimizing the entire sales cycle.
Ask Amy a Question!
Amy is the Go to Market Manager for our ISV Solution and has worked with our community of ISVs across a number of projects. She is well placed to answer any query you might have!
