An application programming interface (API) is a set of rules and protocols that enables different software applications to communicate and share data and functionality. The concept of an API has been around for a long time. However, APIs as you know them emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of the internet and web-based services. As more businesses began to offer online services, the need for a standardized way for these services to interact and share data became apparent.

Software deployment is the manual or automated process of making software available to its intended users. It’s often the final—and most important—stage in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Software deployment is a three-stage process: All software deployments pose challenges, and issues can arise in any of the three stages.

As your experience and knowledge of a system grow, change becomes inevitable. Your application requirements change, your bug fixes require code changes, and your APIs evolve. A key challenge in the software ecosystem is managing changes—especially when they concern APIs. Because you’re likely using APIs in multiple applications, you must document all updates and changes made to your APIs. This is where API versioning becomes crucial.

Incident management is your organization’s first line of defense. When incidents occur, internal teams must be ready to respond quickly. While incidents can happen anytime, it’s unrealistic to expect incident managers to be prepared to perform manual root cause analysis. Manually monitoring and analyzing applications on multiple servers is extremely difficult, which is why human reaction times have traditionally limited the speed of incident management.

Knowing who is in charge helps teams avoid confusion about who to turn to during a crisis, allowing them to focus their efforts where needed. When the pressure is on, an incident commander should have an established response plan to ensure that responders act quickly and coordinate efficiently, and with actionable insights this can be made possible.

Before you can choose the proper tools for your organization, you have to understand its essential business processes. Once you know an essential business process, you can review software applications that will help make your organization more efficient and accurate. Unfortunately, many organizations do not understand their essential business processes. This makes it nearly impossible for them to streamline their organizations, which puts them at a disadvantage in the marketplace.

Maintaining IT infrastructure is a consistent challenge for system administrators, site reliability engineers (SREs), supporting developers, and technicians. Several factors can impact system performance, cause outages, or impact customer experience. On top of that, not all incidents are created equal. The impacts and severity of a system outage affecting 10% of your users are different from an outage impacting 90%.