Building an API is a bit of a balancing act. You want your API to be simple and easy to use, and you want it to be feature-rich and completely customizable. Because those two desires happen to live on opposite ends of the spectrum, every API finds a different stasis in terms of how complex and customizable they are. The SoftLayer API was designed to provide customers with granular control of every action associated with any product or service on our platform; anything you can do in our customer portal can be done via our API. That depth of functionality might be intimidating to developers looking to dive in quickly and incorporate the SoftLayer platform into their applications, so our development team has been working to streamline and simplify some of the most common API services to make them even more accessible.
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To get an idea of what their efforts look like in practice, Phil posted an SLDN blog with a perfect example of how they simplified cloud computing instance (CCI) creation via the API. 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 & ManagementWhile 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 our 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. Our development team observed our customers’ API usage patterns, and they created the slimmed-down and efficient SoftLayer_Virtual_Guest::createObject — a method that only requires seven data points:
Hostname
Domain name
Number of cores
Amount of RAM
Hourly/monthly billing
Local vs SAN disk
Operating SystemWithout showing you a single line of code, you see the improvement. Default values were established for options like Port speeds and Monitoring based on customer usage patterns, and as a result, developers only have to provide half the data to place a new CCI order. Because each data point might require multiple lines of code, the volume of API code required to place an order is slimmed down even more. 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 the development team finds other API services and methods that can be streamlined and simplified like this one, they’ll ninja new solutions to make the API even more accessible. Have you tried coding to the SoftLayer API yet? If not, what’s the biggest roadblock for you? If you’re already a SLAPI coder, what other methods do you use often that could be streamlined?