One of the key drivers of success in today's market is the ability to deliver applications and services within a really short span of time. Modern developers are being asked to do more with less. They have to work within stringent budgets and shorter deadlines and yet deliver technological marvels. In such a scenario, traditional methods of development and deployment prove to be regressive and moving to using of platforms that would enable them to do so is the obvious step that enterprise would resort to.

The two biggest advantages that such platforms offers are cost and convenience. With such technologies, architects can quickly prototype using the new technologies with minimum commitment and cost. These same technologies allow executives to better control and predict cost as well as eliminate redundancies that usually arise in traditional computing. 

The modern technologies often referred to as Cloud Technologies, mainly comprise of virtualization, APIs, DevOps, app lifecycle management tools, and NoOps. They all build on top of each other and combine to enable the next generation of technologies. Each one is necessary for the others. In this article, we focus on APIs and how they are shaping the new generation enterprises. 

API's are the fastest growing, business-influencing technology in the IT industry today. With an API, developers can exploit functions of existing computer programs in other applications. Though APIs have existed for a long time, over the years, they have evolved based on advances in technology like faster network speeds, dynamic integration etc. 

API architecture underwent a major change, with the advent of service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA offers an architectural model to manage consumer and provider relationships in a dynamic environment. This fuelled the growth of building and exposing APIs with better business enablement capabilities including request access, entitlement, identification, authorization, management, monitoring, and analytics. 

Today, progressive companies are sharing their APIs and letting others consume their business functions, for a profit. These companies are making good use of modern, agile and rapid development platforms that enables them to do so. The model is really simple and thoughtful, where these companies have developed functional modules of business capabilities and extended it to others by sharing their APIs for others to use in their functionality. 

APIs offers benefits to both the "offering enterprise" as well as the "utilizing enterprise". For the enterprise that offers its API, it opens a revenue source, and for the utilizing enterprise it offers them with the ability to perform the API functions, yet avoid having to develop and maintain their own API functions. This setup makes business agiler by driving a healthy competition for business operations. 

The advent of rapid application development platforms further helped APIs to flourish. We @CloudIOPlatform offer the ability to host APIs, and provides the right environment to handle multiple and complex API integrations. 

The biggest advantage with the CloudIO Platform is the ability it offers enterprises, to quickly churn out new apps with low operating cost, reduced time to market and platform hosted on-premise or in the cloud thus making APIs and CloudIO Platform the winning combination for enterprises today.

If you'd like to know more about CloudIOPlatform and API's, refer to this link rest-api.html or do write to us at support@cloudio.io, For more information on our products and solutions please visit cloudio.io