The awareness and utilisation of APIs has exploded in recent years. Originally the domain of the software development community, these powerful interoperability enablers are now at the forefront of web, cloud-based and mobile device application development. Although APIs have been around for decades the upsurge in their popularity and standardisation can be ascribed in large part to two major technological and cultural game-changing events: FIRST: The 2006 launch by Amazon Web Services of its S3 (Simple Storage Service) storage service, the first of its Cloud computing services. Amazon S3 was offered via a simple interface (a REST API) to store and retrieve data via the Web. This provided developers with an easy-to-use, scalable and inexpensive storage infrastructure service identical to Amazon's internal IT. S3 was soon followed by Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which offered computing capacity in various sizes using a similar REST API approach. These two new Amazon Web services launched the Cloud computing industry and, at the same time, created the means by which REST APIs would soon dominate the Web Services landscape at the expense of a plethora of more complex preexisting standards.
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