Over the weekend a delegation of Zalandos were in Barcelona, Spain to enjoy the first-ever JBCNConf: the Barcelona Java Users Group's first-ever conference for Java and JVM enthusiasts. Two of our crew — Delivery Lead Sean Floyd and Software Engineer Luis Mineiro — went the extra step and gave a presentation on Zalando's "API First" approach. As Luis and Sean explained in their talk, Zalando is in the middle of a paradigm shift: an evolution from online fashion shop to fashion platform. As part of this evolution, our engineering team has gone “API First”: publishing APIs that other companies can use to take advantage of our massive amounts of data and build their own applications.

Zalando’s primary public API is implemented with Java using Spring and RestEasy, and offers programmers access to the web shop. It also allows for basic operations such as searching for articles, categories, filters and brands.

Making our APIs public has presented some very exciting technical challenges: specifically, how do we auto-scale our API as our audience grows? Sean and Luis gave answers to these and other questions by sharing insights into the architecture-related choices we have made as part of our API First shift. Check out their slides here:

Auto-scaling your API: Insights and Tips from the Zalando Team from Zalando Tech

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