Digital transformation and cloud application adoption are top business imperatives, and the need to connect a growing number of apps and digital experiences is only increasing. APIs give developers easily access to apps and the ability to combine digital assets in different systems, even if those systems were never intended to interoperate.
APIs can automate the transfer of data between different apps and systems, ensuring greater efficiency, improved reliability, and faster rollouts for innovative solutions. According to the State of API Integration Report*, 83 percent of IT specialists, whether focused on the frontend or backend, consider API integration vital for their business. This has put DevOps front and center in digital business strategy as companies seek simple, streamlined ways to develop, deploy, change, and manage apps.
Traditional automation methods like custom scripting, direct integrations, and web services introduce more complexity, and IT teams largely rely on REST APIs to facilitate their automation journey. As a result, Bain & Company estimates, the number of companies scaling their automation will double by 2023**.
Security is the top priority for most organizations, and there’s increased demand for secure integrations with other APIs and systems. Organizations want and need products that can ensure a frictionless API integration experience. Citrix App Delivery and Security (CADS) service provides a simple and rich app-centric configuration model for seamless app delivery, augmented with sophisticated analytics, rich security, and self-healing capabilities.
CADS service APIs are designed using an “outside-in” approach, simplifying the user and developer experience. From APIs, API documentation, API developer portals, and API artifacts, CADS service provides simple and intuitive APIs that offer a self-service developer portal, complete documentation, a great onboarding experience, consistent and useful error messaging, code samples, Postman scripts, and a free developer tier.
CADS service REST APIs lets you build and tailor solutions to suit your business or functional intent. This is essential in enabling integration between discrete microservices APIs. CADS service APIs are well documented on Citrix’s Developer Portal using the OpenAPI standard (formerly known as Swagger) to show parameters, enable live calls, and provide the specification itself for download by developers.
DevOps teams use a variety of tools to automate APIs and set up new environments, which allows them to treat infrastructure as code. As APIs are becoming the essential component of software development, it’s necessary for developers and programmers to manage every stage of the API lifecycle. Let’s look at how CADS service does it.
Postman Integration
CADS service seamlessly integrates with Postman to incorporate automated testing into your CI/CD pipeline ensuring to simplify each step of building an API and streamline collaboration so you can create better APIs faster. Key benefits of CADS service APIs and Postman integration include:
- API-First Development: Release reliable services to build your API before deploying code.
- Application Development: To eliminate dependencies and reduce time to production by having front-end and back-end teams work in parallel.
- Automated Testing: To automate manual tests and integrate them into your CI/CD pipeline to ensure that any code changes will not break the API in production.
- Exploratory Testing: To explore the APIs output data in accordance to variable inputs.
- Developer Onboarding: To quickly get consumers up to speed on what your API can do and how it works.
- Developer Portals: To enable internal and external consumers to consume APIs for app delivery and security.
Terraform Integration for Automating Intent
To enable DevOps to implement business intent, CADS service lets DevOps teams use Terraform for automation with infrastructure as code. These APIs can be leveraged to build powerful Terraform scripts that will translate business intent into human-readable, declarative configuration files. Once you trigger these terraform configuration files, all the terraform resources (or Nitro API calls of CADS service) help you provision and integrate Citrix ADC into your app delivery lifecycle, eliminating human errors.
CADS service is useful in scenarios where admins want a SaaS solution that helps them manage, monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot their global hybrid multi-cloud application delivery infrastructure from a single touchpoint. The key benefits of CADS service APIs are:
- Enabling Operational Efficiency: CADS service helps and enables operational efficiency by providing an exceptionally reliable, available workflow execution engine that scales to meet your needs.
- Enabling DevOps Automation: Customers expect their CloudOps and DevOps teams to be able to leverage automation. CADS service APIs reduce operational overhead and free up IT and DevOps staff to focus on work that adds business value by moving the cloud management tasks to be run automatically.
- No Upfront Investment: Organizations can innovate without making large upfront investment in equipment and can control and power systems down to reduce costs as needed.
- Unlock New Use Cases: It opens the door to innovation, making it possible to unlock use cases that enable access to new customers and seamless integrations with third-party applications
- Increase Customer Retention and Experience (CX): Today’s users demand the ability to stitch together apps and features from different vendors. Products that integrate are more valuable to customers and get more use.
- Faster Time to Market: It gives you flexibility to build the frontend independent of the backend and reuse the components by focusing on core business capabilities and not the long tail.
To get started with Citrix App Delivery and Security Service and your intent-based app delivery journey, go to your Citrix Cloud account today and access the App Delivery and Security tile for your 60-day free trial.
Sources
* 83 percent of IT specialists (frontend and backend developers), consider API integration vital for their business, per the State of API Integration Report.
** Bain & Company estimates number of companies scaling their automation will double by 2023.
