For close to twenty years, the “common standard” of APIs on the web has been summed up in one word: “RESTful.” Designers, developers, and software architects have promoted, debated, and derided the notion of RESTful APIs in successive waves over the years with all sorts of pundits declaring REST “dead” and offering some other current practice as “the new REST” or, even better, “the REST killer.” Probably my favorite rejoinder in this space is Matt McLarty’s “
One of the key tasks of supporting a vital API program for your company is dealing with change over time. In previous articles, I’ve talked about the importance of managing the entire API lifecycle and how to recognize important milestones in the life of an API. These milestones often signal that a change in the way the API is treated, measured, and managed needs to change.
In 2017, Ronnie Mitra presented a talk at Nordic APIs entitled “Programming the People Platform: Beyond Conway’s Law.” In that talk, Mitra outlined a model for distributed decision making and how it can be used to improve API governance. The material from that talk made it into the book “Continuous API Management.” Here, Mitra explained in greater detail how to apply this model to match, and eventually evolve,
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.
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.
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.
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.
