API Evangelist Conversation with Bruno Vaz da Costa, API Architect (digital plumber) at RHI Magnesita

Well, the pleasure is mine. Well, I’m working as system analyst, especially, uh, as integration analysts, I work for RHI Magnesita, which is a refractory. product selling. So they build, uh, refractory products and sell.

Well, especially web APIs. They matter to me because they, They are the, well, this is the marketing, the building blocks of internet, but I like them especially because they, they help us to build, uh, different business and rebuild software that we build in past that actually crappy software, I’d say.

I think, I think the governance, API governance is the hardest part. It’s, it’s hard to sell. Not, not for, not to developers. They understand they are, uh, handling APIs every day, all the time. But for non technical people. It’s hard to sell API governance, although many of them are, are doing some API governance when they, when they are documenting an API, for instance, they are doing API governance stuff, but even though it’s hard to sell. We should, we should talk about API design. We should talk about, uh, API versioning and other stuff. But I think governance, it’s, it’s a scary word. So it’s hard to sell. So it’s hard to, to get the buying and, and do the, the, the whole stuff over, uh, API governance. I think it’s the hardest part, uh, and automate. automate the API governance is also hard to do that when, when you have to learn new tools. Actually, I’m learning MuleSoft and SAP CPI. So when you are used to another tools, it’s hard to, to switch to another ones, but it’s part of the job. But definitely governance, it’s a big challenge.

Sure. Well, it’s kind of new in our industry. We are trying to use, uh, to adopt open API and we have, uh, an issue when the company buys another company. The acquisition It’s kind of easy, but the merge it’s, it’s really, really hard. It takes months, maybe, maybe years and why? Because another company has some legacy applications. That don’t speak well with our applications. So we are thinking about, uh, building on our standards to help the merge. So it’s like buy in, but. Uh, conceptually it’s like buy and, but in fact we are trying to, to build, actually to think about building a framework that will help, uh, the merge when the company decides to buy another, uh, company in the same industry.

It’s kind of different from that because actually we wouldn’t build something like that to open source. So we would do that to help our board to buy another company. Uh, in the last year they bought, I think, three companies. One of them is in United States. So the hard part is to integrate everything and manage the different applications. So under, under, um, unified framework will help to accelerate the merge that that’s the, the, the idea basically.

Sure, definitely. And most of the companies are on premises, so they, they don’t use a lot of cloud services. So this is another, uh, well, it’s not an issue, but you have to handle a lot of custom software. So that’s why standardization, we, we, we think we, It will be helpful.

It’s a good question. I think they are used to do everything on premises, uh, cloud computing is kind of new to them. So they are trying. Actually, my, my, my actual job is to help developers. Uh, on modernizing their legacy apps because everything is on premises. So they are modernizing it to migrate to cloud computing.

This is another hard, hard part. Well, yeah, we, we try to think about only business aspects. We don’t try to think about technical issues and other technical stuff. So when I say, uh, an API must be, uh, business representation and, uh, they kind of, well. But how, how do I get the data? Well, this is the second part. This is the API backend. We don’t have to talk about technical aspects when we are talking about API design. And other stuff that they are related to API governance. So let’s talk business. Let’s talk about only business domain contexts and everything else. And later on, we talk about technical aspects. So I tried to get them only to talk about business and it’s hard because to some, to some people, it’s hard to abstract. The business through API, but it takes time, but it’s done.

Well, it’s been eight years. I’ve been working with API management before that I used to work as software developer in architect. So when I started to work with an API management solution, I thought this is good. I, I don’t have to. To talk about front end or other parts of the software. I, I have room to think about the solution, the whole distributed system and how to connect those parts under the hood and sell it to developers to build another softwares over. That, that API infrastructure. So that I think that’s the, the, the, the biggest, the biggest, uh, uh, incentive I have to keep working with APIs, building API infrastructure.