Building cloud- and API-driven mobile apps introduces complex challenges around syncing, caching and securing data. So, connect live with Layer 7 on Tuesday November 20, at 9am Pacific Time, when Alex will be answering your questions about how to address these challenges. Alex will also provide insight into a range of related best practices, including techniques for building cross-platform applications in HTML 5.

Click here to get the full event details and a reminder in your calendar. On the day of the event, join the event at layer7.com/live and tweet questions to #layer7live.

Therefore, I had to do all the things an active developer regularly has to do (coding, debugging, testing etc.) from a device that has no appreciable hard-drive space and does not allow the installation of any customer software. In essence, I was on a strict diet of browser-based and plug-in based tools and services reachable via an Internet connection.

In relatively short order I was able to find browser-based editors (even ones that support line-by-line server-side debugging!), tools for managing data stores and code repositories. Furthermore, I was able to post test scripts for execution/review and even deploy my projects to a wide range of server providers – all from my browser.

Along the way, I discovered that I had an easier time collaborating online with colleagues in other locations and was better able to take advantage of the most recent releases of new services and tools (since there was no “install” or “update” I had to manage). And – of course – I was more mobile in the process.

Not all programming languages, runtime environments and server profiles are represented in the cloud. And there are still many details to work out in order to make assembling a full-featured “cloud tool chain” easy, reliable and cost effective. Nevertheless, I can see that it is a possibility and I have met people who are working to make that possibility a reality.

My advice to developers would be: Conduct your own experiments; try out your own “cloud-only diet” and see what you learn. Even if you decide that not all the pieces you need are available, you may still discover there are ways to leverage cloud-based tooling to reduce barriers, add flexibility and increase productivity in various aspects of your development efforts.

I’ll be exploring these issues in greater depth when I present a talk titled Programming with the OSS “Cloud Stack” at the CloudDevelop show in Columbus, OH on August 3.

It’s beautiful and quiet at Vail Cascade this morning. As I stepped outside, I’m pretty sure I saw SAML scurrying away into the trees. This is weird given this week’s proclamations that SAML was dead. Although we won’t be rid of SAML anytime soon, I do look forward to enterprise adoption of the new kid on the block: OpenID Connect. Easier federation, OpenID Connect-style is already common for consumer identity providers; enterprise identity providers should take note and follow suit. As a vendor of API Management infrastructure, it’s up to us to enable the enterprise to better reach out to its target audience. I see support for OpenID Connect as a key component in achieving this today.

My favorite proclamation of the week goes to Patrick Harding who declared in his talk titled “The Platformication of the Enterprise is Upon us Again and They Forgot Security (Again)” that API tokens are going to be “the currency of the API economy”. The management of tokens and their lifecycle is indeed a crucial component of API Management. Consider the case of a mobile application consuming an enterprise API using an OAuth token. Such tokens are associated with the API provider, the user (subscriber), the mobile application and the mobile device. Each live token is potentially associated with multiple parties and one of the challenges of API token management is to enable control of the right tokens by the right parties.

One thing that is encouraging and has the potential to trigger disruptive change to the delivery of government services in the US is the recent publication Digital Government: Building a 21st-Century Platform to Better Serve the American People. The word to note here is platform –  it seems that government has taken a page from Facebook, Twitter and the others and embraced the idea that efficient information delivery is not about a carefully-rendered Web page but instead is really a logical consequence of developing an open platform.

I confess to some dread on my first encounter with this report. These publications are usually disheartening products of weaselly management consultant speak refined through the cloudy lens of a professional bureaucrat (“we will be more agile”). But in this instance, the reverse was true: this report is accessible and surprisingly insightful. The authors understand that Mobile+Cloud+Web API+decentralized identity is an equation of highly interrelated parts that, in summation, is the catalyst for the new Internet renaissance. The work is not without its platitudes but even these it bolsters with a pragmatic road map identifying actions, parties responsible and (gasp) even deadlines. It’s actually better than most business plans I’ve read.

Consider this paragraph clarifying just what the report means when it calls for an information-centric approach to architecture:

An information-centric approach decouples information from its presentation. It means beginning with the data or content, describing that information clearly, and then exposing it to other computers in a machine-readable format—commonly known as providing web APIs. In describing the information, we need to ensure it has sound taxonomy (making it searchable) and adequate metadata (making it authoritative). Once the structure of the information is sound, various mechanisms can be built to present it to customers (e g websites, mobile applications, and internal tools) or raw data can be released directly to developers and entrepreneurs outside the organization. This approach to opening data and content means organizations can consume the same web APIs to conduct their day-to-day business and operations as they do to provide services to their customers.

See what I mean? It’s well done.

The overall goal is to outline an information delivery strategy that is fundamentally device agnostic. Its authors fully recognize the growing importance of mobility and concede that mobility means much more than the mobile platforms — iOS and Android, among others — that have commandeered the word today. Tomorrow’s mobility will describe a significant shift in the interaction pattern between producers and consumers of information. Mobility is not a technological instance in time (and in particular, today).

But what really distinguishes this report from being just a well-researched paper echoing the zeitgeist of computing’s cool kids is how prescriptive it is in declaring how government will achieve these goals. The demand that agencies adopt Web APIs is a move that echos Jeff Bezos’ directives a decade ago within eBay (as relayed in Steve Yegge’s now infamous rant):

1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

It was visionary advice then and it is even more valid now. It recognizes that the commercial successes attributed to the Web API approach suggest that just maybe we have finally hit upon a truth in how system integration should occur.

Of course, memos are easy to ignore — unless they demand concrete actions within limited time frames. Here, the time frames are aggressive (and that’s a good thing). Within six months, the Office of Management & Budget must “Issue government-wide open data, content, and web API policy and identify standards and best practices for improved interoperability.” Within 12 months, each government agency must “Ensure all new IT systems follow the open data, content, and web API policy and operationalize agency gov/developer pages” and also “optimize at least two existing priority customer-facing services for mobile use and publish a plan for improving additional existing services.”

If the recent allegations regarding the origins of the Stuxnet worm are accurate, then the President clearly understands the strategic potential of the modern Internet. I would say this report is a sign his administration also clearly understands the transformational potential of APIs and mobility, when applied to government.

I recently read Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast & Slow, a fascinating study of how the human mind works. With the new capabilities offered by big data and Cloud computing — the dual themes for next week’s event — and the increasing personalization of technology through Mobile devices, I think we have an opportunity to make our digital systems more human in their processing. What does that mean?  Well, more intuitive in user experience, more lateral through caching of unstructured data and more adaptive to changing conditions. API-Aware Traffic Management certainly reflects this potential.

If you are going to be (or hope to be) at the event, add a response in the comments box or tweet to @MattMcLartyBC. Hope to see you there!

“The Facebook Connect model is real, it’s powerful and now it’s everywhere. Large volumes of accurate information about individuals can now flow easily through user-authorized API calls. Zero Trust requires initial perfect distrust between disparate networked systems but are we encouraging users to add back too much trust, too readily? What are the ways this new model can be used for ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and how can we mitigate the risks?”

On Thursday May 17 at 9am PDT, I will be delivering a webinar on API identity technologies, once again with Eve Maler from Forrester. We are going to talk about the idea of zero trust with APIs, an important stance to adopt as we approach what Eve often calls “the coming identity singularity” – that is, the time when identity technologies and standards will finally line up with real and immediate need in the industry. Here is the abstract for this webinar:

“Identity, Access & Privacy in the New Hybrid Enterprise: Making Sense of OAuth, OpenID Connect & UMA
In the new hybrid enterprise, organizations need to manage business functions that flow across their domain boundaries in all directions: partners accessing internal applications; employees using mobile devices; internal developers mashing up Cloud services; internal business owners working with third-party app developers.

Integration increasingly happens via APIs and native apps, not browsers. Zero trust is the new starting point for security and access control and it demands Internet scale and technical simplicity – requirements the go-to Web services solutions of the past decade, like SAML and WS-Trust, struggle to solve.

This webinar from Layer 7 Technologies, featuring special guest Eve Maler of Forrester Research, Inc., will:

Many people are familiar with Layer 7’s industry-leading security functionality, so it’s no surprise that I’d recommend using our Gateway technology to protect connections from on-premise infrastructure to off-premise Cloud services. The flexibility of deployment options we offer makes it possible to create a network of secure on- and off-premise endpoints to meet the most stringent requirements. This covers security but what about availability?

People seem to be less familiar with Layer 7’s routing capabilities. Our Gateway technology is optimized to perform flexible, content-based routing with negligible impact on overall transaction times. In the context of the Cloud, this means that traffic proxied by a Layer 7 Gateway can be re-directed using intelligent algorithms and even dynamic, state-based awareness. This routing capability, which I call “API-aware traffic management”, brings huge benefits in ensuring availability when connecting to multiple API instances – on-premise, off-premise, in multiple Clouds… anywhere on the hybrid network.

I’ll be discussing this topic in detail at the upcoming Cloud Expo 2012, June 11-14 in New York City. This promises to be a great event, so I hope you can make it and attend my discussion!

It will be interesting to see whether or not big enterprises buy into this “21st century mainframe” concept but what’s clear is that enterprises now want to migrate critical workloads to the Cloud, en masse. To realize the true benefits of Cloud, many of these workloads will have to be running off-premise. But since many will remain on-premise, enterprises will be relying on hybrid Cloud infrastructure for their most significant IT services.

Security remains a major area of concern for organizations looking to leverage the Cloud. Increasingly, availability and reliability are also significant concerns, particularly since Amazon has had a few outages recently. In addition to addressing these concerns, enterprises are evaluating how they can optimize processing volumes to get maximum cost benefit from their Cloud deployments.

Please join me at the Cloud Expo, June 11-14 in New York, where I’ll be discussing solutions for each of these considerations. Hey, we should have blue skies by then!

Oren suggests that a “true” Cloud solution can only be SaaS-based. While Amazon Web Services, among others, may take umbrage at that definition, I am also a little confused by Oren’s statement since, by most definitions Mashery, is not a SaaS. Typically, a SaaS provides self-enrollment and self-service aspects. Mashery may let you manage your APIs in the Cloud like Layer 7 or Apigee but it doesn’t do this without help from engagement consultants. In that way, they are more akin to IBM than Salesforce.

In the end, our customers don’t get too caught up in Cloud semantics. Some of our customers want to own a solution, others “rent”. Some want a solution in a data-center, others in a public Cloud. We understand that different deployment models are needed to accommodate different needs. If a Cloud deployment is what you are after, try several vendors, verify what you get and compare each solution’s strengths.

Never before has so much intelligence data been collected and never has the challenge of securely sharing these valuable assets been greater. As new intelligence systems come online, issues inevitably arise around the need to make data and security credentials interoperable between these new systems and existing capabilities.

As the leading provider of secure messaging and security Gateway solutions to the US Federal Intelligence Community, Layer 7 will be at the show, demonstrating its solutions for data and security interoperability within the enterprise and the Cloud. If you’re attending the DoDIIS conference, stop by Booth 917 to see first-hand how you can resolve interoperability and fine-grained access challenges with a Common Criteria EAL 4+ certified solution from Layer 7.