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Now we are in age of composite apps. Almost every application and process calls one or more services and APIs. Services/APIs have gone from being secondary extensions to the primary vehicle for delivering enterprise functionality and data.

In the last few years, we’ve been so fixated on the services/APIs, it still hasn’t quite hit us how abstract and brittle our applications, and by extension, our Enterprise has become. Any change, even non-material change to a service/API, breaks all the applications and processes that depend upon it. We’ve lost the forest for the trees.

It’s also worth noting that these services/APIs are coded by hand using almost no automation, standardization, or policy enforcement, and they are manually integrated into applications and processes. This is why we haven’t netted the promised development productivity gain we expected.

This all adds up to the fact that the rise of complexity, and the corresponding fall of business agility, is an epidemic within enterprises.