Integrating API Platform into Internal Developer Platform: A Unified Approach

In the evolving landscape of enterprise technology, the traditional approach of building separate API platforms is no longer sustainable. Instead, integrating API management and capabilities into a comprehensive Internal Developer Platform (IDP) ensures greater agility, efficiency, and coherence in software development. This session explores the pitfalls of isolated API platforms and presents a compelling case for their integration into IDPs. By emphasizing modularity, discovery, and composability, this unified approach can streamline workflows and enhance developer productivity. Drawing from the principles of the Platformless Manifesto, practical strategies, architectural considerations, and real-world examples will illustrate the benefits of this integrated methodology.

Delivering Digital Experiences: The Importance of the Right Internal Developer Platform

In today's experience economy, creating unique digital experiences has become a competitive advantage. However, delivering these experiences is challenging, and organizations often struggle to translate their strategies into value. Technology leaders frequently find themselves focusing on building internal developer platforms to reduce complexity and enhance productivity, rather than concentrating on digital innovation. This requires substantial investments in time, money, and specialized skill sets.
As a strategist or a craftsman embarking on a digital transformation journey, you might be pondering:
Why is having an internal developer platform crucial for success?
What are the characteristics of an effective internal developer platform in the context of the modern experience economy and cloud-native architecture?
How does an internal developer platform accelerate an organization's digital strategy and boost the efficacy of digital strategists?
In this session, Asanka will address these questions by sharing real-life stories from the industry and reference implementations that utilize a market-leading internal developer platform as a service.

Delivering Digital Experiences: Why the Right Platform is Key

In today’s experience economy, unique digital experiences have become a competitive advantage. But delivering these experiences is not easy, and organizations are struggling to convert strategies into value. Too often, technology leaders have had to focus on building platforms to hide complexity and increase productivity, investing significant time, money, and unique skill sets on infrastructure instead of digital innovation.
As a strategist or a craftsman in a digital transformation journey, you might be thinking:
Why is having a digital platform a critical success factor?
What are the characteristics of a digital platform in the modern experience economy, and cloud native architecture?
How does a digital platform fuel and expedite an organization's digital strategy and the effectiveness of the digital strategists?

In this session, Asanka will answer these questions by sharing real stories from the industry and reference implementations that use a market leading digital platform as a service.

Inside and Outside the Mesh: Role of APIs in the Mesh Architecture

When service mesh was introduced as a concept, some thought this was the end of APIs - a few even said: "API Management is Dead". However, it was fiction, and the reality is that APIs are a crucial attribute of modern digital enterprises.
Mesh architecture is fueling distributed patterns like microservices and Web 3.0. As a result, sub-patterns such as data, event, and identity mesh are added to the catalog. At the same time, mesh implementations are improving by utilizing high-performance low-level protocols like eBPF.
In this session, Asanka will deep-dive into the mesh architecture and look at the role of APIs from a digital craftsman's view.

Ballerina - an open source, cloud native programming language for microservices

Ballerina is a new open source, cloud native programming language focused on writing microservices, especially those that compose other microservices, network APIs and data sources.

Ballerina learns from Java, Go, Typescript and a variety of other languages and is a complete programming system designed for the way we program today – network-aware, security-aware, data-aware, repository-aware, concurrent, strongly typed and chaos-ready.

Securing the Digital Double - The Path to a Trusted Digital Ecosystem

Digital life is a replication of the physical world in a digital ecosystem. As a result, people and things have an equal digital representation, which we call a digital double. Your digital double is active and involved in various activities, even when you take a nap. Therefore, securing the digital double is critical.
As an enterprise or security architect designing digital experiences, you have to pay attention to privacy, confidentiality, trust, and the security of a digital double.
In this session, Asanka will explain an architectural approach to building a trusted digital ecosystem using APIs, integration, and identity.

Delivering Digital Experiences: Why the Right Platform is Key

In today’s experience economy, unique digital experiences have become a competitive advantage. But delivering these experiences is not easy, and organizations are struggling to convert strategies into value. Too often, technology leaders have had to focus on building platforms to hide complexity and increase productivity, investing significant time, money, and unique skill sets on infrastructure instead of digital innovation.
As a strategist or a craftsman in a digital transformation journey, you might be thinking:
Why is having a digital platform a critical success factor?
What are the characteristics of a digital platform in the modern experience economy, and cloud native architecture?
How does a digital platform fuel and expedite an organization's digital strategy and the effectiveness of the digital strategists?

In this session, Asanka will answer these questions by sharing real stories from the industry and reference implementations that use a market leading digital platform as a service.

Creating a Seamless Access Experience with the Digital Double

Today, seamless access experiences are crafted based on identity fundamentals such as single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, passwordless authentication, self-service portals, and federated access. But, is this enough for the next epoch of digital applications, metaverse, and Web 3.0?
The digital world is a replication of the physical world in a digital ecosystem. As a result, people and things have an equal digital representation, which we call a digital double.
In this talk, Asanka will look at creating a seamless access experience around the digital double using APIs, integration, and identity in order to prepare organizations to address the next digital era.

The reconstitution of middleware with APIs

Complexity created by distributed computing encapsulated by the middleware for over two decades and made application developers productive by letting them focus on business logic relevant to their domain. Modern architecture and technology drift, such as Microservices, Cloud-native, and Serverless do not have room to embed middleware into the application development while the need is still there.
In this talk, Asanka is going to deep-dive into an API-centric, decentralized, and code-first approach to fill the void of middleware and make the application developer productive again.

Quantum Duality of “API as a business and a technology”

Every thriving API program leverages the elements from business and technology equally. Alignment of business and technology strategy, the synergy between business and technical teams, and adaptability to the changes coming from either business or technology are fundamental characteristics of such an environment.
Asanka will look at four areas, federation and business models, moving to the cloud, polyglot and heterogeneous approach, and modernizing development during this talk. He will also share real-world examples based on his involvement in numerous success stories.

Building an Integrated Supply Chain for APIs

APIs are the products of the 21st century. As we build out API systems, we find that we are constantly learning from product journeys. We propose a new kind of supply chain - the Integrated Supply Chain for APIs (ISCA) - which is needed by any organization looking to create and monetize API products, either directly or indirectly. In this session, Asanka will outline our vision of the ISCA, identify five key patterns for success, and give a blueprint for creating a digital business based on API products.

Architecting the Transformation

Most organizations engaged in transformation today are moving from left to right in digitally-driven maturity models. The objectives are well known: increase agility, boost productivity, and provide seamless digital experiences for consumers.
Architects play a pivotal role as the curators of this transformation. In this session, Asanka will share his experience on how architects can contribute and introduce a framework to follow on refactoring enterprises.

APIs - The Glue of Microservices: An Introduction to the Cell-based Architecture

The number of microservices running in enterprises increases daily. As a result, service composition, governance, security, and observability are becoming a challenge to implement and incorporate. A ‚cell-based‚ architecture is an approach that can be applied to current or desired development and technologies to address these issues. This technology-neutral approach helps cloud-native dev teams become more efficient, act in a more self-organized manner, and speed overall release times. In this talk, Asanka will introduce the "cell-based" reference architecture, which is API-centric, cloud-native and microservices friendly. He will explain the role of APIs in the cell-based approach, as well as examine how real applications are built as cells. Asanka will explore the metrics and approaches that can be used to measure the effectiveness of the architecture and explore how organizations can implement the cell approach.

Achieving true agility through programmability

Enterprise agility—the ability to adapt fast and seize new opportunities while reducing costs—is critical for an organization to survive and thrive in this evolving digital age. While the rewards of bringing about agile transformation are significant, how many companies really achieve key results? Did you know the success rate is less than 10%? Even organizations that follow various agile methodologies do not adhere to them across the board, resulting in what’s known as agile-waterfall or wagile approaches.
Is there a pragmatic way to become truly agile?
Yes, by embracing programmability. This approach goes beyond infrastructure automation, which is a common practice, by enabling programmatic access to automate actions, procedures, processes, and runtimes used in an application’s entire lifecycle. With programmability and end-to-end automation, teams can increase productivity and flexibility and quickly decommission repeatable tasks; they can also spend more time on implementing innovative ideas.
Asanka will share his experience from applying programmability in successful projects delivered iteratively, rapidly and in a timely way. In addition to the associated lean methodology, he will discuss a supportive reference architecture.

A Decentralized Reference Architecture for Cloud-native Applications

The number of microservices running in enterprises increases daily. As a result, service composition, governance, security, and observability are becoming a challenge to implement and incorporate. A “cell-based” architecture is an approach that can be applied to current or desired development and technologies to address these issues. This technology-neutral approach helps cloud-native dev teams become more efficient, act in a more self-organized manner, and speed overall release times.
In this talk, Asanka will introduce the "cell-based" reference architecture, which is decentralized, API-centric, cloud-native and microservices friendly. He will explain the role of APIs in the cell-based approach, as well as examine how real applications are built as cells. Asanka will explore the metrics and approaches that can be used to measure the effectiveness of the architecture and explore how organizations can implement the cell approach.

Crossing the low-code and pro-code chasm: a platform approach

Organizations are now using low-code and pro-code tools to build digital experiences internally and externally. However, not having the right alignment between these two approaches slows down delivery.
Different developer personas that work in silos, no connection between low-code and pro-code applications, low-code creating unmanageable shadow IT applications, no single codebase or build pipeline, and interruptions to the professional developer flow are some significant drawbacks.
In this session, Asanka will look at a platform approach to bridge the low-code and pro-code chasm.

Based on https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/03/11/optimizing-low-code-tools-for-enterprise-application-development/

Embracing Platformless: A Revolutionary Approach to Enterprise Software Engineering

In this session, Asanka introduces "platformless" computing – a groundbreaking framework for enterprise software engineering with potentially greater impact than the move from app server to serverless. He will unravel how shifting from traditional platform-centric models to a platformless strategy simplifies and enhances the application development and delivery process. Focusing on key concepts like API-first, cloud native middleware, platform engineering, and developer experience (DX), the presentation will showcase how platformless integrates these elements for increased agility and innovation. Attendees will learn how this approach can fundamentally transform enterprise software engineering, emphasizing efficiency, scalability, and a focus on creating impactful applications.

Based on the paper I published https://github.com/wso2/reference-architecture/blob/master/platformless.md