By Lee Caswell and Induprakas Keri
APIs don’t get nearly enough glory. APIs are the underappreciated gems of today’s modern infrastructure. They allow users to tap into partner ecosystem functionality while automating configuration, provisioning, and patching drudgery that distracts teams from supporting new value for developers, such as containerization and generative AI readiness.
And it turns out APIs are hard to build with legacy infrastructure. APIs have historically been developed using competing standards - think SOAP, REST, xAPI, etc. - that support components of infrastructure - think Fibre Channel SANs, virtualized servers, and proprietary networks.
As a result, APIs have been difficult to optimize, provide different levels of security and compliance, and are difficult for generalists to deploy.
All modern clouds rely on software-defined server-based platforms that abstract physical compute, storage, and server resources. Once physical resources are abstracted to a software-defined platform, it’s possible to architect uniform APIs that can be used across every cloud. This means you can write and maintain APIs once for self-service or automation, for example, that operate at the edge, in the data center, or in the public cloud.
APIs developed for a platform can be applied uniformly across all platform resources to manage security and access control. Identity Access Management (IAM) and fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC) is built in to ensure your security posture is preserved while you automate operations, while least privilege access can be controlled down to a single API operation. And APIs based on the Open API standard offer developers choice through SDK’s and Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform and Ansible.
At Nutanix, we are standardizing on new V4 APIs that allow operators to drive the integrated Nutanix Cloud Platform. For more technical details on our v4 API implementation – please visit: https://www.nutanix.dev/api-reference-v4/
The scalability and resiliency of modern infrastructure platforms are well-known. Now, with an integrated API approach, customers can realize the benefits of a platform-level approach to simplify, secure, and optimize infrastructure for the most demanding workloads.
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