You can ditch repetitive, frustrating work and focus on what really drives value! The enterprise-scale API sprawl problem IDC predicts that by the end of 2022, 90% of new digital services will be built using application programming interfaces.

And yet, we dream of things becoming decoupled with microservices, but sometimes they end up more tightly coupled. Distributed and decoupled are not synonyms. In fact, the more distributed your systems are, the larger your organization is, and the more third-party integrations you use, the more complex your stack becomes and the more you depend on other people, data, and code.

Things get even worse when organizations use open source. Most organizations have no idea how much their APIs have sprawled, so they release them quarterly instead of several times a day or even once every two weeks. This runs counter to how your customers demand new features faster and faster. And it’s risky, because these are much larger update bundles that are more likely to fail to integrate and are harder to roll back.

This proliferation of tools and teams makes enterprise decision-making very slow, with lots of points of contact. And it sacrifices developer autonomy. It all comes down to a lack of visibility across scattered teams, departments, and divisions. This leads to waste, as people build what has already been built elsewhere in the company. The cost of this loss of developer productivity is staggering.

The 2021 State of DevOps report found that limited automation of repetitive tasks, combined with a lack of self-service platforms, puts quality, speed, and scale at risk.

The 2021 Google Cloud State of API Economy report found that a lack of centralized API management directly raises concerns about stability, scalability, compliance, and security.

A lack of consistent API design enforcement and a lack of a unified developer experience lead to a sharp decline in developer productivity. Most humiliatingly, the average developer spends more than 17 hours a week debugging and refactoring inconsistent code. All of this adds up to an annual productivity loss of around 300 billion dollars!

Low-code is like autocomplete

This disconnected status quo not only slows down the release cycle, but also means developers are working on repetitive tasks. A survey of 600 engineers asked them to think about what they would like to spend less time on:

  • Manually testing changes/writing scripts: 37%
  • Refactoring legacy code: 35%
  • Writing code for new features: 33%

Only one of these activities actually delivers value to customers. Enterprises face a huge array of tools, massive investments in talent, and numerous bottlenecks that slow down decision-making and the release of new features, as well as fragmented communication between teams.

The work is highly individualized and manual, from scripts to flaky releases. Enterprises go through lengthy and expensive hiring processes to make up for bad code instead of investing in tools.

What are companies stuck on today?

  • custom scripts
  • lack of shared visibility
  • manual release strategies
  • failed rollbacks.

As developers, we always love waking up to a new challenge. We’re creative workers and we want new problems, tools, and use cases. We’re eager to become more connected to business value.

The only way to achieve this is to automate as much of our work as possible. With centralized API management, you can create templates and reuse APIs for similar use cases throughout the organization, simply customizing them as needed.

This ensures consistency and predictability across the organization—from fields to response codes. No more repeating the same mistakes. This level of automation is supported by spec-driven API development, which means better, more automated documentation—no more flying blind or connecting to an API that isn’t fit for purpose!

By enabling low-code API development, you can automate best practices throughout the API lifecycle. It also enables more cross-functional, cross-organizational collaboration, with everyone aligned, making it easier to connect technical changes to business goals. This helps meet the growing enterprise demand for visibility and security at every point of interaction—automated guardrails that ensure only APIs meeting a defined level of quality and security are released.

APIs are the logical place in your stack to start automating developer workflows. This shift to centralized API management has increased developer productivity by an average of 65%. Overall, a centralized API management approach reduces time to market through standardization, reliability, reusability, and automation.

Most importantly, it boosts developer satisfaction. DevOps productivity is a real problem, but low-code can be the next big step toward improving your productivity, focus, and value delivery.” It is also predicted that over the next two years, 70% of enterprises will reduce the cost and complexity of configuring enterprise applications by investing in platforms. Put these two observations together, and it’s clear: the future belongs to low-code and platforms.

An API management platform is becoming the solution to these recurring problems of time constraints, lack of know-how, and growing complexity. A unified platform abstracts away complexity, so developers don’t have to log into ten different tools or interact with ten different teams. With the right API management tool, your team can create a purpose-built workflow or use integrations to work with the tools you already like. For most enterprises, what matters is that a platform approach to APIs means consistency and transparency—something governance, risk management, compliance, and security teams especially appreciate. And developers like that they still have a degree of choice in tools and release autonomy, while working on important and interesting problems.

So low-code becomes less a harbinger of work automation and more a natural way to get the boring bits out of your work.