Survey on application programming interfaces in software defined networks and network function virtualization

In the world of service-oriented businesses the deployment of services is of utmost importance. On the Web, the service-oriented business has a major impact through Web Application Program Interfaces (APIs). In the field of Web applications, majority of the applications run on the Web/Internet APIs. These APIs are dependent on architecture styles such as Representational State Transfer (REST) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). Over a decade, REST is widely used for architectural style in API design followed by RPC. These styles are used extensively in various domains. This paper presents the survey of such APIs in the world of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). The main contributions of the paper is to provide a ready reference for developing effective and efficient orchestration approaches towards micro services in SDN and NFV domains. The survey aims to help practitioners and researchers in this field to follow guidelines and standards for designing higher quality services.