Yousaf Nabi

Lessons from Our API Past: Evolving to a Resilient API Future

Is your microservice architecture secretly a distributed monolith? Learn how contract testing helps you escape the trap and deploy services with confidence.

Lessons from Our API Past: Evolving to a Resilient API Future
#1about 3 minutes

Understanding the high stakes of modern API failures

Critical failures in APIs can cause massive disruption, as seen in real-world examples of zombie APIs, insecure design, and knowledge loss.

#2about 3 minutes

How microservices increased system complexity and failure points

The evolution from waterfall monoliths to agile microservices created a "service death star" with numerous potential points of failure.

#3about 2 minutes

Navigating the headwinds and barriers of microservice sprawl

Teams face challenges with microservice adoption due to a lack of skills, system complexity, and pressure to deliver features quickly.

#4about 5 minutes

Why traditional testing methods fail for microservice architectures

Integrated and end-to-end tests become slow, flaky, and hard to debug, providing feedback too late in the development cycle.

#5about 7 minutes

The role and limitations of API specifications

While OpenAPI and AsyncAPI provide a common language, they don't solve provider drift, consumer drift, versioning, or governance challenges.

#6about 3 minutes

Introducing contract testing for safe API evolution

Contract testing validates interactions between services in isolation, providing fast feedback without the need for integrated environments.

#7about 2 minutes

Implementing a safe deployment workflow with Pact Broker

The Pact Broker stores contracts and enables the `can-i-deploy` tool to verify compatibility before deploying services independently.

#8about 2 minutes

Gaining early feedback with advanced contract testing techniques

Bi-directional contract testing and design-time checks in tools like Swagger Editor provide impact analysis before any code is written.

#9about 2 minutes

Preparing for the future with AI agent workflows

The Arazzo specification helps document and compose complex, deterministic API workflows to manage the rise of AI agent consumers.

#10about 1 minute

Using contract testing to build a version-free API

By understanding consumer usage through contracts, teams can manage breaking changes, combat Hyrum's Law, and reduce the need for API versioning.

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Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

API Designer

API Designer

Krell Consulting & Training

Remote
Intermediate
API
Java
REST
Python
+2