This full presentation was at the Mashery Business of APIs Conference in 2013.

Daniel Jacobson, Director of API Engineering at Netflix, discusses the evolution of the company’s API program using Simon Sinek’s ‘Start With Why’ framework. Jacobson stresses the importance of designing an API that answers the company’s philosophical needs before deciding how to best expose the platform to internal or external developers. Jacobson further explains why APIs are critical to the success of developer communities, business partnerships, internal development efficiencies and device proliferation.

Key Points:

• Ensure system reliability and resiliency by scaling the API with the business
• The advantage of optimizing systems for rapid innovation and improved product experience
• Why it may be necessary to consider hardware constraints when designing an API

“We’re focusing on our streaming application — what Netflix is trying to do — and then we’re implementing a tactic, which happens to be an API, to accomplish that.”

The following is the video of the full presentation:

And here are the slides from this presentation:

The following is a short clip of the presentation that Mashery published, highlighting APIs as a Tactic to Advance Business Strategy.

This is my presentation from the Business of APIs Conference in SF, held by Mashery (http://www.apiconference.com). This talk talks briefly about the history of the Netflix API, then goes into three main categories of scaling:

• 1. Using the cloud to scale in size and internationally
• 2. Using Webkit to scale application development in parallel to the flexibility afforded by the API
• 3. Redesigning the API to improve performance and to downscale the infrastructure as the system scales

When viewing these slides, please note that they are almost entirely image-based, so I have added notes for each slide to detail the talking points.