“Breaking Changes” with Arun Narayanaswamy of Amadeus Labs: APIs and the Cloud
In a recent episode of Breaking Changes, I sat down with Arun Narayanaswamy of Amadeus Labs to chat about the relationship between APIs and the cloud. As a DevOps and cloud-native veteran, Arun has seen the realities of enterprise organizations migrating to the cloud as they work to adopt and adapt to the benefits of operating a cloud-native business. Personally, I see a symbiotic relationship between APIs and the cloud, and Arun’s expertise in this area got me really thinking about how enterprise organizations should be tapping into this relationship and using it to move operations forward.
I feel pretty strongly that the cloud, and specifically Salesforce and Amazon, were the catalysts for the entire world of APIs we are using to power almost every industry online today. Arun and I discussed how enterprise organizations augmenting (or replacing) their datacenter investments with a more elastic and dynamic cloud infrastructure will continue to define our API operations for years to come. Arun laid out the realities of cloud versus on-premises, multi-cloud, and just what a different mindset it is to operate APIs in the cloud. Lifting and shifting your enterprise into the cloud isn’t the answer, and change is inevitable. But, that is a good thing!
We talked about the fundamentals of being cloud-native and multi-cloud, but Arun also educated me on FinOps and automating, or even gamifying, your teams’ cloud spending. He also provided me with one of the best explanations I’ve ever heard of how it is easier to secure your operations in the cloud.
I can tell that Arun has been around when it comes to actual enterprise digital transformation. The way he spoke of hiring, managing teams in the cloud, and the benefits and risks of being cloud-native and multi-cloud, it’s clear he’s experienced some serious shifts in the enterprise landscape. This leaves me curious about what Amadeus is up to, but also has me revisiting my earlier work around how APIs enable a cloud existence.
After talking with Arun, I set up a public workspace to fork the official Amadeus collections and play around with what they are building for the travel industry. I am also linking to the three unofficial AWS, Azure, and Google workspaces I have set up, demonstrating how I am using these three cloud providers’ APIs to automate across the API lifecycle, from definition to distribution. I will also be forking the pricing APIs for each of the cloud providers to help me understand how I can better automate and gamify my own team billing across these cloud platforms. As you can see, my conversation with Arun got me thinking on several levels—which is what Breaking Changes is all about.
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