I only ever use internal APIs at work. I've never used anyone's external APIs and am wondering if there's a whole tech ecosystem I'm missing out on. What are some commercial use cases you all have had?
From an ops perspective, many *aaS providers simply don't have working features that we need, so we use their API and build our own solution.
From a dev perspective, there are industry standard APIs which a range of products support, and to design a new product that we want to sell, we have to use said APIs and work with different providers and customers. There are so many differing APIs to do the same thing that we have an internal team whose job is to write an internal API that internal customers use to interface with all the external APIs. This model scales well, as this API-of-APIs team can integrate new solutions transparently to the internal customers, so we don't have to rewrite products just because an external API/provider/customer/etc changed. (back in the day this was with straight databases and apps, and the intermediate layer was called "db apps", and was basically an early API)
