Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
Application programming interfaces are the foundational method for interacting with devices, applications, controllers, and other networked entities. Although the command-line interface has reigned supreme for years, we must admit, if an entity has an API, it is the desirable method for interacting with it.
APIs are common in many fashions: some are application to application, whereas others are application to hardware entity. Consider some of the following interactions as examples:
■ DNAC software controller API call to Cisco Support API endpoint for opening cases: software to software
■ Cisco Intersight with UCS IMC for device registration, monitoring, and provisioning from the cloud: software to hardware
■ Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) to ASR1000 for provisioning and monitoring: software to hardware
To use an API, you must know the way to make requests, how to authenticate to the service, how to handle the return results (data encoding), and other conventions it may use, such as cookies. Public APIs often involve denial-of-service protections beyond authentication, such as rate limiting the number of requests per time period, the number of requests from an IP endpoint, and pagination or volume of data returned.
For the purposes of network IT, we mostly focus on web APIs, as we discuss in the next section on REST APIs, but other common APIs you may experience are the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) and Microsoft Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) APIs. JDBC and ODBC permit connections to different types of databases, such as Oracle, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL Server, with standard interfaces that ease application development.
The Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is also a well-known design model for web services. It uses XML and schemas with a strongly typed messaging framework. A web service definition (WSDL) defines the interaction between a service provider and the consumer. In Cisco Unified Communications, the Administrative XML Web Service (AXL) is a SOAP-based interface enabling insertion, retrieval, updates, and removal of data from the Unified Communication configuration database.
Because a SOAP message has the XML element of an “envelope” and further contains a “body,” many people draw the parallel of SOAP being like a postal envelope, with the necessary container and the message within, to REST being like a postcard that has none of the “wrapper” and still contains information. Figure 10-12 illustrates this architecture.
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Figure 10.12 Cisco ACI Architecture with APIC Controllers
APIs are used in many Internet interactions—logins, data collection, performance reporting, analytics. Microservices are associated with APIs as self-contained, lightweight endpoints that you can interact with to gather data or effect change. They are usually specific to a function, such as validate login, and are engineered with resiliency in mind, so continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes allow for routine maintenance without service impact to users.