The Enterprise API Strategy Cookbook: 8 Ingredients for Legacy Modernization
Blog post from Kong
An enterprise API strategy is essential for modern businesses to maintain competitiveness by transforming monolithic systems into manageable services, enabling rapid product development, innovation, and cost efficiency. Unlike a microservices strategy, which focuses on implementation, an enterprise API strategy emphasizes the interface and consumption model, thus allowing successful API deployment over monolithic systems without immediately adopting microservices. The strategy should articulate business value in terms of shareholder returns and competitive advantage, rather than technical details, and should include a controlled, incremental approach to legacy system retirement using the Strangler Fig pattern. This approach reduces risks associated with traditional replatforming by incrementally migrating functions to new APIs, allowing continuous business operation and validation. Moreover, the strategy advocates for API governance and funding models that treat APIs as perpetual products rather than temporary projects, ensuring sustained investment and preventing the decay of the API ecosystem. Key metrics for evaluating the strategy's success, such as the Reuse Dividend and integration lead time, help secure executive buy-in by demonstrating tangible ROI and aligning with strategic business goals.