Like any product, APIs and client apps that use APIs have their own lifecycles. They each experience their own Create, Publish, Realize, Maintain, and Retire phases. When things go well, services will experience important use (and re-use) and grow to maturity to provide significant contributions to your company’s performance. And client apps will use APIs that connect to one or more services and, in their own way, create their own cycle of growth and maturity to increase revenue and/or customer use in ways that also spells success for your organization.

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Just like any product, APIs have their own lifecycle with distinct phases. And recognizing them means you can take advantage of them by focusing on the right aims and the proper convenance at each step along the way. This was one of the key lessons we focused on when we wrote the “Continuous API Management” book in 2018.

There are situations when you need to invest lots of time and effort to get an API product ready for consumption.

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A key element of any healthy API program is the ability to upgrade and migrate existing services in your ecosystem without causing fatal service disruptions. It takes a concerted effort to safely and successfully complete API migrations and, in my experience, organizations who can consistently upgrade their running systems share a common set of skills and employ similar techniques.

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Mike Amundsen recently joined MuleSoft as API Strategy Advisor. Mike is a well-known API expert in the global software engineering community and has authored and co-authored numerous books including “RESTful Web APIs,” “Microservice Architecture,” and “Continuous API Management,” all from O’Reilly. His latest book, “Design and Build Great APIs,” will be available through Pragmatic Bookshelf later this year.

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