Right now, the API is at the center of an incredible amount of technological innovation. Across the Web, through the Cloud and onto your mobile device, APIs power all manner of app-building, integration and virtualization initiatives. For individual users and large enterprises alike, APIs are helping us all make good use of an increasingly diverse range of technological options.

We’ve just added two new pieces of API-related content to our Resource Library: a solution brief called API Management for Content Providers and a white paper called Using Layer 7’s API Gateway for vCloud Architectures. The solution brief explores how content providers can utilize innovative distribution methods while keeping customer account data secure and controlling how content is shared. The white paper explains how vCloud APIs can be used to securely facilitate automation and management of application infrastructure in the Cloud.

The topics covered by these documents are, in many ways, quite different. There’s a common thread here, though. Today’s enterprises need ways to secure and manage their APIs, whether these APIs are used to deliver TV shows to mobile devices or to manage enterprise applications run in the Cloud. In either case, we’re here to help!

For the fourth year in a row, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison used his Oracle OpenWorld opening address yesterday to showcase his vision for delivering software inside pre-configured and optimized hardware. Much has changed since he first stood on the stage at the Moscone Center in 2008, to introduce Exadata on HP hardware.  While his choice of hardware may no longer be HP, his interest in merging software and hardware into something that delivers more than its constituent parts has not diminished.

Now some will snicker that software inside a “pizza box” seems more like a decade-old vision than a foundation for the next ten years. Today, after all, the action is in the Cloud. But it’s never been an either/or situation. Larry Ellison probably knows more about Cloud than most, having funded Cloud pioneer Salesforce.com before launching its primary competitor, NetSuite. So his embrace of appliances doesn’t conflict with the adoption of Cloud. Quite the opposite – modularized software/hardware combinations will become the bedrock for those building Clouds, as evidenced by the EMC-Cisco-VMware joint VCE (Virtual Computing Environment) venture. The accelerated introduction of new appliances this week also demonstrates a larger truth: the enterprise will never be completely in the Cloud.

While the Cloud is great for delivering shared services or consuming specific types of application functionality without IT, it will never 100% replace an organization’s need for traditional software. Despite the whirlwind of innovation in the last 40 years, enterprises rarely replace what isn’t broken. For that reason, mainframes still underpin many of our everyday interactions with banks, insurance companies, travel sites and other enterprise entities.  Moreover, companies will always have the need to own select internal information infrastructure and incrementally add new components to this infrastructure. Appliances for some software tasks let them do this with less cost and complexity.

At Layer 7, for several years now, we have been actively selling appliances to simplify integration, security and governance of applications shared with other applications both inside and outside enterprise boundaries. When we started, these appliances were primarily physical and the sharing was primarily internal. In the intervening years, the sharing has moved outside the DMZ and to apps residing on a mobile tablet like the iPad or in a Cloud like AWS. Moreover, our definition of “appliance” has evolved to reflect changing views of hardware virtualization. Today, we sell more “appliances” on VMware and AWS than we do hardware but the idea remains the same: remove the cost and complexity of application integration, application security and application governance with appliances.  One plus one sometimes can equal three!

On the eve of this week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas, VMware announced that Micro Cloud Foundry is finally available for general distribution. This new offering is a completely self-contained instantiation of the company’s Cloud Foundry PaaS solution, which I wrote about earlier this spring. Micro Cloud Foundry comes packaged as a virtual machine, easily distributable on a USB key (as they proved at today’s session on this topic at VMworld), or as a quick download. The distribution is designed to run locally on your laptop without any external dependencies. This allows developers to code and test Cloud Foundry apps offline, and deploy these to the cloud with little more than some simple scripting. This may be the killer app PaaS needs to be taken seriously by the development community.

The reason Micro Cloud Foundry appeals to me is that it fits well with my own coding style (at least for the small amount of development I still find time to do). My work seems to divide into two different buckets consisting of those things I do locally, and the things I do in the cloud. More often than not, things find themselves in one bucket or the other because of how well the tooling supports my work style for the task at hand.

As a case in point, I always build presentations locally using PowerPoint. If you’ve ever seen one of my presentations, you hopefully remember a lot of pictures and illustrations, and not a lot of bullet points. I’m something of a frustrated graphic designer. I lack any formal training, but I suppose that I share some of the work style of a real designer—notably intense focus, iterative development, and lots of experimentation.

Developing a highly graphic presentation is the kind of work that relies as much on tool capability as it does on user expertise. But most of all, it demands a highly responsive experience. Nothing kills my design cycle like latency. I have never seen a cloud-based tool for presentations that meets all of my needs, so for the foreseeable future, local PowerPoint will remain my illustration tool of choice.

I find that software development is a little like presentation design. It responds well to intense focus and enjoys a very iterative style. And like graphic design, coding is a discipline that demands instantaneous feedback. Sometimes I write applications in a simple text editor, but when I can, I much prefer the power of a full IDE. Sometimes I think that IntelliJ IDEA is the smartest guy in the room. So for many of the same reasons I prefer local PowerPoint for presentations, so too I prefer a local IDE with few if any external dependencies for software development.

What I’ve discovered is that I don’t want to develop in the cloud; but I do want to use cloud services and probably deploy my application into the cloud. I want a local cloud I can work on offline without any external dependency. (In truth, I really do code on airplanes—indeed some of my best work takes place at 35,000 feet.) Once I’m ready to deploy, I want to migrate my app into the cloud without modifying the underlying code.

Until recently, this was hard to do. But it sounds like Micro Cloud Foundry is just what I have been looking for. More on this topic once I’ve had a chance to dig deeply into it.