Any maestro API coder will acknowledge the fact that API is a gigantic beast, with many inlets, outlets,options and choices. API provides access to the majority of server’s products and also gives a platform for interaction with their administration, ticketing and billing system. In a nutshell,it is aimed to impart the greatest level of control to clients. However, the depth of complexity and functionality of API might be intimidating to many developers .
Everyone wants their API to be simple and easy to use, feature-rich and completely customizable. Since both these features lie on the opposite poles, building an API becomes a very equilibrizing act. The development team of SoftLayer has been trying solve this conundrum by streamlining and simplifying some of their most common API services to make them more accessible.
The new SoftLayer API is designed to provide customers with granular control of every action associated with any product or service on their platform; anything one can do in their customer portal can be done via their API. For this, they’ve come up with a SoftLayer_Virtual_Guest::createObject . This new method will provide a simplified way to create a Cloud Computing Instance order.
SoftLayer recently updated their SLDN blog with a perfect example of how they simplified cloud computing instance (CCI) creation. Let’s see what their efforts look like in practice.
The traditional CCI ordering process required developers to define nineteen data points:
Hostname
Domain name
complexType
Package Id
Location Id
Quantity to order
Number of cores
Amount of RAM
Remote management options
Port speeds
Public bandwidth allotment
Primary subnet size
Disk size
Operating system
Monitoring
Notification
Response
VPN Management – Private Network
Vulnerability Assessments & Management
While each of those data points is straightforward, you still have to define nineteen of them. You have all of those options when you check out through their shopping cart, so it makes sense that you’d have them in the API, but when it comes to ordering through the API, you don’t necessarily need all of those options. Hence, SoftLayer observed their customers’ API usage patterns. Default values were established for options like Port speeds and Monitoring based on customer usage patterns. As a result, with a slimmed-down and efficient SoftLayer_Virtual_Guest::createObject — one only needs to enter seven data points:
Hostname
Domain name
Number of cores
Amount of RAM
Hourly/monthly billing
Local vs SAN disk
Operating System
So basically, without showing you a single line of code, you see the improvement. And hold your horses, icing on the cake is yet to come. The best part is that if you find yourself needing to modify one of the now-default options like Port speeds or Monitoring, you still can!
As their development team finds other API services and methods that can be streamlined and simplified like this one, they’ll devise new solutions to make the API even more accessible.
