A way of modeling an external API provider as a compute resource for executing an agent program. Instead of making a request and getting a response (as in the usual HTTP API pattern) you submit a program that executes in the provider’s environment. This could allow users of an API to simplify their access patterns, benefit from data locality, and have stronger guarantees for execution than hosting their own infrastructure.
For example, instead of making a read request to get some data then make a write based on that data and wait for an async webhook, the requestor could submit a program that does all of that executes within the providers contained environment.
See also:
- How we should build APIs tomorrow that talks about some of the problems with the current RESTful approach