API Gateway

Well, it was very nice to actually attend a User Group meeting in person. It seems like it’s been forever. SunTUG 22 seemed to be pretty well attended. Kevin Shabow, the North American Director of NonStop Sales, kicked off the conference and asked for direct feedback from the audience. This harkened back to the origins of ITUG when Jimmy and execs would have open forums about what was needed, what was working, and what wasn’t. Jimmy always mentioned how very valuable direct customer feedback was to him and the team.

One of the best ways to modernize NonStop is to integrate its applications with other software, platforms and cloud services. This interoperability is extremely important as it will extend the value of the NonStop applications, and underscore the flexibility of the platform in the enterprise.

APIs have seen fast growth and adoption for many years now; as of 2020, it was estimated that there are over 24,000 APIs in use, just in the financial industry. While the number of APIs used is increasing, the more important statistic is the value these APIs bring to businesses. Services offered by APIs now account for 75% of many large companies’ revenue. For example, Salesforce generates 50% of its revenue through RESTful APIs, eBay 60%, and Expedia generates 90% of its total revenue through the use of APIs. Without the help of RESTful APIs, these companies might cease to exist.

Deon Ballard, Principal product marketing manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is quoted saying: “Sometimes you want boring. Sometimes you want reliable and predictable and all the things that you generally don’t want your first date to describe you as you really want your operating system customers to describe you like that.” I like that quote. If RHEL is boring, NonStop must indeed be comatose. Of course, Mr. Ballard is correct you do want boring in an Operating System, one that allows you to sleep well and with confidence.

There’s been a lot of talk over the last few years about Kafka, but what is it, and how might it impact NonStop applications and data? According to the Kafka Apache project, Kafka is “the most popular open-source stream-processing software for collecting, processing, storing and analyzing data at scale.” Kafka is used by thousands of companies, including 60% of the Fortune 100. Well known users in the finance space include Goldman Sachs, Rabobank, Barclays, Jack Henry and PayPal, and household names that use Kafka include Netflix, Oracle, LinkedIn and AirBnB.

One of the main trends highlighted in our recent article The Top 5 Trends in REST Services relates to payment applications, and in particular, simplifying access to legacy payments applications like BASE24 and Connex, both of which are still very popular on the HPE NonStop platform.

Here at NuWave Technologies, we’re always working with forward-thinking HPE NonStop server users looking to modernize or simplify access to their valuable NonStop applications and data. We’re also tracking trends outside the NonStop space, in an effort to ensure our LightWave solutions stay current with industry requirements and trends.