Comments Off on Forbes : Why APIs Now Mean Business Transformation, Not Just Technology Infrastructure

By daniel_jacobson, March 23, 2016 12:12 pm

This article was originally written by Dan Woods and published on Forbes on March 23, 2016

Thirty-six years ago, my first consulting project was fixing an IBM 360 assembler language program that had broken because the behavior of one of the machine instructions had change subtly.  At that time, you could consider the definition of the IBM 360 assembler language an API to the hardware.

In the years that passed, the idea of the API has changed. We’ve moved from LPA libs, to JCL, to Microsoft DLLs, Java packages and Python libraries. The strict definition of the term “application programming interface” suggests that the API is a tool of abstraction and simplification. The application developer doesn’t want to want to have to worry about the details of how to send a text message from a mobile app or how to run an analytics routine in R or how to display a graphic using the D3 libraries.

Where is your API journey taking you?

Because of this legacy, APIs are most often seen as something deeply technical, and this impression lingers to this day. But as Google and Yahoo rose out of the wreckage of the dot com bust, as Facebook and Twitter were born, the technological essence of APIs is giving way to a more business-focused emphasis on enabling unfettered innovation.

The APIs of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Twitter in the mid and late 2000s were unusual in that they were public. These APIs did have a technological purpose. They abstracted the basic capabilities of publishers so that they became useful for developers. But the point and the value was unrestricted innovation. SAP had APIs decades before called BAPIs that allowed their massive ERP system to be controlled. The trick that the Internet darlings performed was to figure out that by making APIs public, by allowing self-service, a seething tribe of creative developers could put those APIs to use creating new ways to put the core services to work. John Musser, the founder of Programmable Web, was the prophet of this era.

For example, Google Maps was one of the first public APIs to be created, inspired in part because developers figured out how to use Google’s capabilities on their own in an unauthorized manner. Google quickly realized that this was a great idea, published APIs, and a flood of innovation and use of Google Maps followed. Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon followed the same pattern for many of their services.

So in this era, John Musser created a catalog of public APIs and Chet Kapoor of Apigee and other companies like Mashery, now part of Tibco, and others created products to allow everyone to get in the game of creating public APIs. Working with the CTO of Apigee, Greg Brail, and Daniel Jacobson, VP of Edge Engineering at Netflix, I co-authored APIs: A Strategy Guide (O’Reilly), a book about API strategy. (Disclosure: I have done work as an analyst and content marketer for Apigee, Intel, Tibco, Microsoft, and other companies who sell API technology. For a full list of my clients visit EvolvedMedia.com/clients.)

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The point of that book was to explain the notion of APIs from top to bottom, but also to explain how APIs had become far more than just technology infrastructure.

How APIs Have Become the Building Blocks of Business Transformation

Daniel Jacobson’s evolution of APIs at Netflix shows how APIs can become building blocks for business transformation. Jacobson is in charge of creating the API infrastructure to support product development. Netflix, like many other companies, had a set of “resource-based” APIs that exposed the core capabilities of the key operational systems. Using these APIs, you could get to the catalog information on Netflix and invoke services to play movies.

Jacobson and his team determined that the code they were writing to create Netflix clients for various families of devices such as iPhones, iPads, Android tablets, DVD players, and so on was far more complex than it needed to be. The problem was that resource-based APIs were built to expose the capabilities of key systems in a general way. That mean that the client code had to do all sorts of stuff like transform and combine data, connect information from a multitude of sources, and create data structures and navigation that matched the needs of the device.

Jacobson’s team realized that a new layer of APIs was needed, which they called experience-based APIs (see “How A Netflix Tech Innovation Can Unleash Creativity in Your Business”). This layer of APIs was created not by the teams in charge of the key operational systems, which created the general purpose resource-based APIs. Rather, the developers in charge of creating clients for all the devices used to access Netflix defined just the APIs needed for each family of devices. The experience-based APIs moved all the code for transforming and formatting data and adapting the resource-based APIs to the needs of the device into the experience-based API. Jacobson’s team found that this process could be accelerated by allowing the experience-based APIs to be created using a scripting language. Jacobson and his team packaged this idea as the Nicobar open source project.

APIs as a Unit of Digital Business Design

FinTech and other industries have taken the general pattern of experience-based APIs and adapted it to different circumstances. Consider these examples:

• Tradier has created a Brokerage-as-a-Service offering that is a combination of resource- and experience-based APIs. Tradier customers are able to embed the ability to research and trade stocks within their existing applications.
• Orchard Platforms has created a platform powered by APIs that normalizes access to lending marketplaces. Using this platform, large financial institutions can make loans on platforms like Prosper and Lending Club using automated underwriting.
• Xignite has created a set of APIs that normalizes access to a vast amount of financial data. Some of these APIs are resource-based, providing general access, and some are experience-based, focused on meeting a specific need.
• Bechtel has introduced huge amounts of efficiencies by creating a platform as well as resource- and experience-based APIs to enable the creation of mobile apps. On job sites around the world, instant access to information has dramatically reduced delays because workers don’t have to go to sheds to access computers.

The point to remember is that all of these APIs are both technical artifacts and units of digital business design. As technology infrastructure, both resource-based and experience-based APIs need to be supported by generic API gateway capabilities such as:

• Proxy support
• Authentication/Authorization
• SSL/TLS termination
• Encryption
• Logging
• Load balancing
• Routing
• Throttling
• Lightweight orchestration

But there is another business-focused process going on here as well: the process of developing the unit of business design. In other words, resource-based and especially experience-based APIs are not designed simply as technology artifacts, but as ways to enable a business purpose. The people involved in designing the desired digital business experience must be involved.

Enterprise-grade API management – the kind that can power digital transformation and drive a business – goes beyond an API gateway and supports an ecosystem of digital collaboration. Many types of software follow this path. The software starts out supporting specific, targeted functionality but ends up adding features because people want to collaborate and need supporting capabilities as the original function becomes more important.

When you are using APIs as a unit of digital business design, you need capabilities such as:

• Analytics about developers, operational performance, app performance, and business metrics
• A customized developer portal
• API monetization
• Multi-tenancy and support for high scale
• Global policy enforcement
• SDKs for all popular development environments to simplify the process of developing an API
• Support for adding application code and data to the API infrastructure to enable distribution of code and data
• A powerful transformation engine to speed the task of adapting resource-based APIs to experience-based APIs

It is perfectly possible to use APIs as a unit of business design without an enterprise-grade API management platform. The challenge then becomes creating enterprise capabilities when you need them and supporting them over time.

The API marketplace is evolving rapidly. Amazon recently released an API gateway product. Microsoft has one as well, and there are various types of open source toolkits and such. The functionality of many of these vendors’ products supports the notion that APIs are simply technology infrastructure.

But vendors like Apigee would argue that to really use APIs as a unit of digital business design, to accelerate the creation of business value that comes from apps that can be developed faster and that cost less to maintain because of practices like experience-based design, you need much more than an API gateway.

“APIs have gone well beyond just bits of technology – they are essentially the foundation for digital transformation,” said Apigee’s Kapoor. “We believe that businesses will need to use APIs and API management to support digital business initiatives or risk becoming increasingly irrelevant.”

The challenge in my view is the legacy that APIs have as a unit of technology infrastructure. The people who are buying solutions are often thinking small about APIs rather than thinking big. The challenge for anyone using APIs is to stop thinking of them only as technology and to start thinking about the results you want to achieve and how APIs can play a role in getting there faster.

Dan Woods is on a mission to help people find the technology they need to succeed. Users of technology should visit CITO Research, a publication where early adopters find technology that matters. Vendors should visit Evolved Media for advice about how to find the right buyers. See list of Dan’s clients on this page.

Comments Off on Forbes : How A Netflix Tech Innovation Can Unleash Creativity in Your Business

By daniel_jacobson, February 11, 2015 5:59 pm

This article was originally published by Dan Woods on Forbes on February 11, 2015

In the tech community, Netflix is a company that everyone learns from. But what is less widely celebrated are the broader business lessons of what Netflix has accomplished. I was bonked over the head by this point when I sat through a presentation about Experience-based APIs by Daniel Jacobson, VP of Edge Engineering for Netflix.

Jacobson and his team that builds and maintains the Netflix API platform have developed a way of working that solves a problem that is common in any company that is building its own technology: How do you best leverage the skills of everyone on a team so you can move as fast as possible? Jacobson and his team have figured this out for a general use case: Building many different applications based on a complex set of centralized resources. The structure of this solution, which relies on the idea of separation of concerns between different groups of developers, can help optimize the structure of many different types of teams.

For those who work on building software, Jacobson has embedded in the Nicobar open source project the technical capabilities needed to support for the separation of concerns and rapid innovation. I will describe briefly the Nicobar project, which was released yesterday, at the end of this article.

What are Experience-based APIs?

To understand the beauty of Experience-based APIs, we first must understand the challenge facing Netflix with respect to supporting many devices. Netflix client developers write software applications that allow Netflix to deliver its content over thousands of different devices types. Netflix has many teams of client developers, each of which specialize in creating applications for different types of devices. The goal of Jacobson’s team and the client development teams is to deliver a great user experience and make sure that Netflix works perfectly on any device you might use, from an iPad, to an Android phone, to a DVD player or smart TV.

In the Resource-based API platform the work gets done this way:

• The central API team creates APIs that make it easy to get to all of the data and resources of a company. These APIs are all about creating a general way for programs to get access to customer data, data about films, recommendations, and so on. The resources that a client program may need include data and services for:
  • User info
  • Movie metadata
  • Movie Ratings
  • Similar movies
  • My list
• The central team implements the APIs to deliver scalability and excellent performance.
• The client team takes these APIs and creates applications for a variety of devices. The problem is that the code for handing errors and adapting the data to the needs of the device all resides in the client application code.

The Resource-based API paradigm works just fine and is used all over the world. But Jacobson and his team wanted to find a way to move faster, create better software, and enable more optimized experiences for Netflix subscribers. They realized that different devices potentially needed a different set of data to support the user experience. The best way to make the client software simpler would be to have a new API that allowed as much as possible of the data translation, error handing, and other utility functions to happen on the server, not on the client.

But if you asked the central API team to create versions of APIs for all the different families of devices, the team would be overwhelmed. In addition, it would be hard for each of the client teams to actually ask for the right design for the APIs they would need. It would require trial and error and that would be hard to accomplish with many client teams competing for the attention of the central team.

Jacobson and his team realized they needed to create a new layer of API they called an Experience-based API. The idea is that the client team should design the perfect API to serve the needs of the device on which the client application will run.

For example, when writing the application code to create a page on the client using the resource-based approach, the developer may have to call a dozen APIs, handle errors from all of them, and then format the data for use on the page. All of this communication takes place over HTTP, which is less efficient than the networking methods used on the server.

But if the client developers could create their own API to support the needs of that page, and move all of the code for data access from the client to the server, lots of good things would happen such as:

• Client code would get simpler.
• More code could be shared across families of devices.
• New device families could be supported faster in a way that best fit the needs of the device.
• Performance could improve because network communication is optimized, reducing round trips from the device to the server.

So Jacobson and his team set out to create a new layer to enable client developers to create their own APIs. Here’s how it works:

• Client developers analyze the application that they want to build for a particular client and then decide on the APIs that they will need to support them.
• They define the endpoints of the APIs and protocols to handle the requests and responses that are optimized for their client
• The APIs are implemented by the client developers using the Groovy scripting language which is used to call Java APIs that will gather the data needed to handle the request. Groovy is easier for client developers to work with than Java but still is scalable enough.

This architecture, in the case of Netflix powered by Nicobar, allows the client teams to move faster and reduce the technical debt by making the client programs simpler. The code enabled by Nicobar is more shareable and easier to maintain.

“There are some significant engineering benefits to this structure, but the real win is increasing the velocity of innovation,” said Jacobson. “Because Experience-based APIs properly separate concerns across the two teams, the work gets done faster. The client teams control their own velocity and the server teams can focus on building the platform that supports them.”

Lessons for the Rest of Us

Jacobson, Greg Brail, Chief Architect of Apigee, and I were co-authors of “APIs: A Strategy Guide”. During the time we wrote the book in 2010, the world was focused on the impact that public APIs were having. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon all harnessed massive amounts of attention and energy as people put their public APIs to work.

At that time Jacobson argued that internal use of APIs would have the far larger impact. He saw that few companies, even Netflix, would be able to get a large amount of value from public innovation. Instead, the real victory would come as internal APIs increased efficiency, productivity, and the velocity of innovation. Experience-based APIs are one major proof point for Jacobson’s way of thinking.

I believe this two-tier structure that allows those closest to the problem to translate the Resource-based APIs to a more suitable form and create APIs that are adapted to their needs can be used in all sorts of companies who how have bottlenecks in their IT departments.

To make this work you need a front office IT staff, one that works with the business. These are the equivalent of the client teams at Netflix. The back office IT provides Resource-based APIs to the front office teams who then use simple tools, scripting languages, model driven development, content management systems, and so on to adapt the resources to the needs of the business. In large Wall Street Firms it is common to have highly skilled front office IT teams. I think that many companies could benefit from this model if they choose the right tools and create the right separation of concerns.

Nicobar 

For companies who create -multiple applications and are committed to the Java ecosystem, Nicobar is definitely worth a look. This library provides the core functionality to implement the Experience-based API program. Right now the Groovy language is the way that the adapter code to assemble the data needed for the Experience-based is written, but in the future other JVM languages may be supported.

The key capabilities of Nicobar are:

• Rapid application delivery via dynamic updates of components
• Ability to add support for multiple JVM languages

To learn more go to Nicobar: Dynamic Scripting Library for Java.

And, for the truly nerdy, here’s what the project wiki says about why the project was called Nicobar:

“Nicobar refers to a remote, archipelagic island chain in the Eastern Indian Ocean. It is aUNESCO World Biosphere Reserve, and like many other remote volcanic islands, it has rich biodiversity, and various endemic species are found here. Taken together with the surrounding Andaman group of islands, six different human tribes occupy these islands, each with its own spoken language. We felt that these isolated islands, evolving independently are a good metaphor for the polyglot, modular runtime framework we were setting out to build.”

Dan Woods is on a mission to help people find the technology they need to succeed. Users of technology should visit CITO Research, a publication where early adopters find technology that matters. Vendors should visit Evolved Media for advice about how to find the right buyers. See list of Dan’s clients on this page.

Comments Off on Presentation : API Revolutions and the API Strategy Conference

By daniel_jacobson, February 25, 2013 7:31 am

Congratulations again to Kin Lane and everyone at 3Scale for a very successful and fulfilling API Strategy Conference. There were a lot of great presentations and panels as well a many very interesting hallway conversations.

And I was exited to be able to speak at the event! Embedded below are the slides from my presentation, complete with copious notes on each slide to provide the context of what I said during the talk.

The focus of the presentation was on API revolutions. We have seen a number of them in the recent years, but there have been significant and substantial changes for Netflix and for some others that warrant discussion. The question that remains is: Are these changes specific to a small handful of companies or are these companies representing things to come for the API world as a whole?

-Daniel

Comments Off on Content Portability: Building an API is Not Enough

By daniel_jacobson, December 10, 2012 8:20 pm

This post first appeared on ProgrammableWeb.com

My previous posts focused on COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) and content modularity, the fundamentals for ensuring that content can be managed and distributed to virtually any platform. But ensuring that your content can be delivered to those other platforms does not mean that it can display appropriately on them.

Content often contains very important semantic markup, used to emphasize the content, relate it to other content, describe it, etc. By markup, I mean HTML, character encodings and microformats, among others. Although this markup is important to the content, it also makes it “dirty”, potentially compromising its ability to live and flourish in the myriad places to which it will get distributed. No matter how modular the content is in the database, if it is sullied by this markup, it is not truly portable. As a result, just building an API is not enough. The API needs to be able to distribute the content to any platform in a way that each platform can handle.

To demonstrate this problem around portability, I often use the pre-iPhone iPod as an example. This device did not parse HTML. Rather, tags would simply be printed as strings. When podcasting took off, some NPR titles had HTML tags in them, including < em > and < strong >. Because iPods were not able to render the HTML, titles would like something like, “This is a < em >great< /em > title!” Similar, another fail scenario that is relevant to NPR is an HD Radio display. These devices are also not able to render markup printing these tags to the screen.

There are two primary ways of handling this problem. The more common way is to store the dirty content in the database and to maintain a series of scripts that handle it on the way out. Although this is potentially effective for specific goals, there are some significant problems with it. For starters, stripping out the markup as it gets distributed means that the markup still lives with the content in the database. As a result, as new platforms arise and as markup standards evolve, the markup in the content will remain static. So, each distribution script that handles the markup will need to be carefully maintained and updated accordingly. Moreover, since each distribution platform could have its own compliance with the various forms of markup, each of these outputs may require their own script to handle the content (that is, the more distribution channels there are, the more scripts there are to maintain). Finally, the majority of systems that allow markup in this way do very little to limit the type of markup that is used. Because of the tremendous variance in how the markup is used in the content, these scripts will need to be increasingly complex, causing the accuracy to be tougher to guarantee.

Rather than handling the cleansing process on the way out, NPR has created a system that cleans the content on the way in. The goal here is to save the content in the database in a modular AND portable way. That means that each discrete object type is stored separately while ensuring that text content in each object is devoid of markup. I call this system “Markup Addressing” and here is how it works:

• A range of fields in the system are markup-enabled, allowing Editors and scripts to include HTML and other markup values in the content directly.
• For each field that allows markup, very specific values are allowed. Some fields allow more, some less, but all fields are limited to nothing more than the 25 tags and character encodings that the system as a whole allows.
• We apply client-side handling to ensure that no markup beyond those allowed by the field are used for that field. We also enforce proper nesting and syntax for the markup.
• Before saving the clean and acceptable markup to the database, we identify all markup for each field and begin our “addressing”, which is essentially identifying the character numbers of the markup in the text. For each tag or character identified, we find the character position for where it starts. If applicable, we also find the character position for the close tag. We then strip out the markup from the text and store in a relational table the address in the text that the markup was found.
• This relational table does not include the markup itself. Rather, that is stored in a separate table that is the authority for which tags are allowable. The image below represents roughly how we store this kind of information.

• The diagram above represents how NPR strips out markup from content fields prior to saving to the database. The markup is then “addressed” and stored in a series of relational tables, enabling any presentation layer to present the content with or without markup. It even allows the markup to be easily transformed as needed before pushing to different platforms. (Click here for an enlargement of this diagram)

There are several very tangible benefits to this approach, all of which improve overall portability of the content. These benefits include:

• Distributing the content without any markup is as simple as pushing out the content from the database directly, without any further processing. This is helpful for platforms that are unable to render markup, including those mentioned in my examples above.
• Distributing the content with the original markup is just as easy by reassembling the markup based on the addresses.
• It is easy to only distribute only some of the markup based on what the markup is. An example of this is if the destination product wants to emphasize content but does not want to allow for links to other content.
• As markup, such as HTML tags, get deprecated, this approach only requires a change to one field in the entire database, instead of having to cycle through the database to find all instances of the old tag to replace it with the new one. For example, < b > has been replaced with < strong >, so we simply need to modify the one record in the authority table for tags to make this change apply across the entire set of content.
• As new platforms arise, if they require specialized markup, it is easy to transform the existing markup to anything else required for these new platforms.
• Adding new allowable tags is easy by simply extending the client-side handling and the authority table. These tags can include microformats and other business-critical tags that help describe the content. For example, NPR could very easily create a tag for our internal purposes for < station >, such that for every station that gets tagged, rather than rendering this tag, the system will look up the station in our database and replace that < station > tag with a hyperlink to the station’s home page.

NPR’s system applies these methods to specific fields throughout our CMS. When distributing the content through the API, however, we only currently apply the power of Markup Addressing to the story full text. The API has a field for < text > which removes all markup for the syndication as well as < textWithHtml > which reassembles the content with all markup. Extending this to all other markup-enabled fields would be quite easy under this system, although there has not yet been a need to do so.

Regardless of which approach is taken, there is one other significant issue that prevents true portability of content… the content itself!

I create a distinction between “content” and “calls-to-action” to help clarify this problem. Content is the information that the users actually want to consume. It could also include metadata, which helps to accurately describe the content that the user is actually consuming. Within this content, applying markup that emphasizes it or relates it to other content should be done in such a way that the meaning of the content is unaltered by the abstraction of the markup from the content. Here is an example of an appropriate way to apply markup to the content:

This image is part of an NPR story that demonstrates appropriate use of HTML within the body of the text. The artists’ names are linking to artist pages, but the meaning of the story is completely unaltered by the removal of the markup.

In this scenario, removing the links to the artists’ names in the text, for example, does not alter the meaning of the content. Of course, it does diminish some of its power as the user cannot easily learn more about these artists within the context of this story. That said, distribution of this content without those links will not adversely affect the meaning of the story. The artist names are valid and appropriate within the body of the text.

Applying markup within the content that is calling the users to perform an action, on the other hand, poses a different problem. Here is an example of a call-to-action within the content:

This image is part of the same NPR story demonstrating the use of calls-to-action, which make the content unable to provide meaning without the context of the markup. These calls-to-action make the content less portable, specifically to platforms that are not markup enabled.

Notice that within this content there is a link to related content where the link text is “Listen to The Entire Album”. Abstracting away the link itself actually alters the meaning of the text as the text provides no information about the audio asset. There is no indication as to what album or who the artist is. So, as this content gets distributed to platforms (both known and unknown), pulling out the markup actually adversely affects the content.

This is a problem for every content producer, including NPR. Although we have gone through great measures to put the content in the best position to live and thrive in all platforms, there is still work to be done to ensure the success of our distribution strategies. Some of these efforts are technical in nature. Others could impact editorial processes and style guides. But in all cases, our goals are the same… to be a media organization that produces great content for our users, wherever they wish to consume it.

Comments Off on Content Modularity: More Than Just Data Normalization

By daniel_jacobson, December 10, 2012 8:10 pm

This post first appeared on ProgrammableWeb.com

As discussed in my previous post, COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) is a fundamental philosophy that drives NPR’s digital publishing and distribution strategy and is the foundation of the NPR API. Supporting it all is a single system that manages all incoming content and funnels it out through a single distribution pipe, regardless of content type or destination. A key principle that supports COPE is ensuring that content is stored in a modular way.

Modular storage of content is more than just database normalization. It requires strategic design of the data model to ensure that discreet objects are stored in distinct locations. To create the right design, you must truly understand your system and the assets that it stores. That is, you need to be able to identify and represent the object (or series of objects) that is at the core of your system. For NPR, the core of the system is a story. We then attach “resources” to the story, each of which is its own object in the database (examples of resources include full text with each paragraph stored as distinct records, audio, video, images, related links, and a range of other object types). Then stories get attached to lists, which are essentially a series of taxonomies that help our systems slice through the stories.

The diagram above is a basic entity diagram of how NPR manages data for a story, some related resources and the list to which the stories are assigned. This is a conceptual model that represents how these entities relate to each other and does not include all resource or list entities in the system. The physical model, obviously, is much more complex. Click here for a larger and more complete view of this diagram (PDF).

NPR’s system is obviously much more complicated than this, but the breakdown of story/resources/lists is the foundation of it all. Accordingly, storage of this information in the database needs to ensure that all of these objects can be manipulated independently. With this approach, NPR is able to create a list of all images in the system, or all stories that have video, or all stories in the News topic, or any number of other combinations of stories or resources. The power of this modularity is that we have tremendous control over what gets distributed to each destination. And the distribution of content for all of these scenarios is the same simple REST-based API, requiring no special coding to generate the content for the different destinations.

The above is an excerpt of XML outputted from the NPR API. Clean, effective storage of the content makes it a simpler and more flexible process to manage it differently as it gets distributed to different destinations. Click here to see an expanded view of the XML with annotation detailing how it maps to the entity diagram.

Conversely, WPT’s tend to store objects to enable the building of a web page. As a result, the content may be bundled together in database fields, storing the actual references to images, video and audio entirely within the story content text. It is still possible that the WPT’s are adhering to some form of data normalization in their storage techniques, but that does not mean that these systems are embracing COPE.

There are two significant problems with the WPT approach of data storage. First, as an example, the image references within the block of text will contain HTML and possibly other markup, making the text block dirty. Any distribution to other platforms could then require special treatment to prepare the content for that destination. More importantly, however, is the fact that these same images are very difficult to repurpose because they are embedded in text. So, it would be quite a challenge to make a feed of images, to identify only those posts that contain images, to resize some or all images in the system, or to consistently restrict distribution of images that do not have the rights cleared.

Building systems that manage the content in a modular way and separates it from display sets it up well to be distributed on a range of platforms. The final piece to the puzzle, however, is content portability. Content portability ensures that the content can actually live and thrive in all platforms to which it gets distributed (even those that do not yet exist). Building a distribution channel, like an API, is simply not enough anymore. Content portability must be applied at the CMS level, which will be the topic of my next article.