Business and Use Cases for using OWIN and Katana

Question

actually i know there are topics and question of KATANA benefits and i know them but my question is what Katana can do for me on business side ? like why i should use WEB API as a separated module(middleware)? with which middleware it can be useful to combined with ?

in another way

Can any one explain to me what the really business benefits and business cases or use cases that OWIN\Katana will help me on?

I do not mean the Technical advantages like the lightweight issue and the separated framework update and the Host issues.

I mean, how I can gain a real business advantages of using Katana on my applications?

Example: I can do authentication on my application without using OWIN middlewares right? Why should I use the authentications middleware provided by OWIN?

Answer 1

This is not an easy question to answer. OWIN/Katana are pretty low level aspects of a solution, hence it's hard to make a pure business argument for it. In your example question you say "I can do authentication on my application without using OWIN middlewares right? Why should I use the authentications middleware provided by OWIN?". Adding authentication code in your application is a bad idea for many technical reasons - you are forced to rewrite the same auth code for all your application instead of reusing a ready made library; you are writing security sensitive code, hence unless you are a security expert and extremely thorough yo risk introducing security issues (whereas using a ready library produced by security experts saves you that burden). All those are technical arguments but do translate in direct business impact - just think about all the companies who had security issues last year and the impact on their bottom line, brand, customer trust and the like. At the same time, those are arguments in favor of ANY componentization of authentication code, not OWIN specifically. The advantages of OWIN are the ability to achieve high density services (==less iron, less CAPEX or cloud bills) and a higher degree of portability (with ASPNET Core, that means being able to use non-Windows platforms - more freedom in case you have mixed environments, if you are in the process of merging with a company using a different IT environment, etc). HTH!