Many businesses that want to increase the user experience in their applications have recently integrated multiple API services into their systems. REST APIs are preferred, especially since they are easily integrated into applications and platforms. So, do businesses directly use the API they integrate into their applications, or do they manage the data flow it provides? They actually manage the APIs they integrate into these systems with API management or, more popularly, API orchestration.
API orchestration is a management process where different APIs are brought together, and data sharing is organized between these APIs. This process includes integrating and managing API protocols, such as different REST APIs from outside with enterprises’ own systems or platforms. API orchestration is often used when complex and diverse services, such as large-scale applications, websites, or software, need to work together. In this article, we will first discuss API orchestration’s importance. Then, we will touch on its common use cases.
Table of Contents
Why is API Orchestration Important?
API orchestration is a very important topic for businesses. Because they organize and integrate data and transaction sharing by bringing different APIs together.
Learn in detail about API integration, the most important part of the API orchestration.
Here are some key reasons for API orchestration for businesses:
- Efficiency and Collaboration: API orchestration optimizes data and transaction sharing between disparate systems. In this way, businesses can obtain data more quickly and effectively. Thus, multiple internal APIs integrated into the systems help to provide a healthier and more effective data flow between teams.
- Flexibility and Extensibility: With the application programming interface (API) orchestration, businesses bring flexibility and extensibility to businesses by combining different APIs. Businesses can easily add APIs suitable for their needs to their systems. They can quickly adapt to changing requirements by making API calls to the APIs they integrate into their systems.
- Automation of Business Processes: API orchestration facilitates the automation of business processes. It automates repetitive processes and reduces human error by making frontend and backend services interoperable with different APIs.
- Improving Customer Experience: It makes it possible to provide better and personalized services to customers. Customers have a more positive experience by receiving content and services that fit their needs.
Use Cases of API Orchestration
In this section, we will examine some of the most common use cases of API orchestration, item by item.
- Many businesses with an international e-commerce platform want to show customers product prices in different countries in their local currency. For this, these businesses can integrate one of the popular forex APIs, such as Fixer API, into their system and manage this API. In this way, for example, a customer from Germany can see and shop products on the British e-commerce site in Euro, the local currency of Germany.
- Some tourism businesses serving in the tourism sector offer personalized travel guides according to the geographical location of the users. They do this by using and managing comprehensive IP geolocation APIs such as the ipstack API. The ipstack API helps users to automatically personalize the content of the travel application according to the city or country of the user by determining their geographic location.
- Many media organizations today automatically obtain news headlines and content from around the world and present them to users. They usually do this with a web scraping API like Zenscrape that offers an unblocked scraping experience. Zenscrape API allows news sites to deliver up-to-date and relevant news content by regularly scraping news headlines and content from their websites. Discover the best practices of web scraping with Python!
Conclusion
In summary, API orchestration is an important system that increases the efficiency of businesses by integrating different APIs and regulating data sharing. An API orchestration system consists of API orchestration layers that bring together different APIs, and such a system organizes the data flow so that different APIs become interoperable. Additionally, the API orchestration layer allows businesses to integrate multiple APIs and seamlessly handle different data formats.
Choose the best REST APIs for your needs, integrate them into your application, and start orchestrating!
FAQs
Q: Can I Orchestrate Multiple APIs?
A: Yes, you can. You can orchestrate multiple APIs using API integration techniques. API orchestration enables you to integrate multiple APIs into a system in a consistent and coordinated way. This allows them to work together efficiently and share data seamlessly.
Q: What is the API Orchestration Layer?
A: The API orchestration layer works as an intermediary component that works to facilitate integrating multiple APIs. Additionally, it manages the interactions between different APIs. This ensures that the data flow and communication between them are optimized and well-coordinated.
Q: Why is API Gateway Important in the API Orchestration Process?
A: API gateway plays a crucial role in the API editing process. It acts as a central entry point and API integration center by routing requests to appropriate APIs and managing data flow. Moreover, it simplifies the process of integrating and managing multiple APIs, contributing to a smoother and more efficient API orchestration process.
Q: How Do API Integration Tools Work?
A: API orchestration tools typically include an orchestration API. This API acts as a middleware, allowing seamless communication and coordination between different APIs. When an application sends API requests to the orchestration API, it directs and distributes them to the appropriate APIs.
