Chapter 11. Continuing the Journey
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API management is a complex subject, and we’ve had to cover a lot of ground in this book to explore it. We started by examining the foundational concept of API governance and what it means to do decision-based work. Focusing on decisions led us to a model of decision making with elements we could distribute or map. Mapping decisions gave us a powerful, nuanced way of managing API work.
With this foundation we started our journey by introducing the first important API management factor: the product perspective. Treating the API as a product gives you a guiding light for deciding which decisions matter the most. We started with this focus on a single API product because the context of local optimization was important and also easier to grasp than the complex landscape that would come later. We explored the local context of an API by taking a tour of the ten pillars of work (and decisions) that form an API product as well as the teams and culture that make that work happen.
With this local scope of API management in hand, we turned up the heat by introducing you to a second API management factor: time. Taking time into consideration meant that we needed to pay closer attention to how to manage changes to an API product, specifically in terms of the impact to the API’s users, maintainers, and owners. Thinking about an API over time also led us to an API product lifecycle model that identified how the impact of change evolves as an API matures through the stages of creation, publication, realization, maintenance, and retirement.
Finally, we added the third factor of API management: scale. We introduced you to the API landscape and the 10,000-foot view of the complex system. The last half of the book focused on this system optimization scope and the decisions that go along with it. We introduced the “eight Vs” of a landscape: variety, vocabulary, volume, velocity, vulnerability, visibility, versioning, and volatility. This framework described the most important variables in the complex system that you need to manage and the complex interplay between them all. At the end of the book we mapped this complex set of landscape factors against the ten pillars we introduced at the very beginning.
That’s a lot of information, frameworks, and models—but at the heart of API management are those four fundamental parts: governance, products, time, and scale. No matter what kind of APIs you have, what industry you are operating in, or the size of your company, you’ll need to manage APIs from all of those perspectives. We’ve given you a set of tools in this book to help you do that today.
Prepare for the Future
It’s hard to say what the future will look like, but we’re certain that the connectedness of software isn’t a passing trend. As archtitectures become more reliant on components being interoperable or integrated, the demand for API management will grow, even as the protocols, formats, styles, and languages that underpin it change and evolve.
We’ve tried to write this book in a way that will be useful for you regardless of the specific technology choices you’ve made. The core concepts of governance, product thinking, time, and scale are essential and timeless for API management. So, even as everything changes around you, you’ll have a set of concepts and frameworks that will help you make sense of it.
Use the API-as-a-Product mentality to help drive your design and implementation choices. This gives you the freedom to make APIs that fit your users’ needs and context instead of being at the mercy of industry trends and hype cycles. Distribute API decision work based on the goals, talent, and context of your organization, instead of trying to clone the working culture of the latest successful startup.
Above all, embrace the complexity of the system you are managing. Get an understanding of how time and scale change the work that needs to happen. Use the API product lifecycle and the landscape’s eight Vs to frame your context. Play the “what if?” game with the landscape variables to assess your system: What if the variety increases? What if velocity stops being important? Your answers to these questions might not be prescient, but they’ll definitely be enlightening.
Start Managing Today
When you’re faced with a big problem in a complex, complicated domain, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. At the beginning of this book, we talked about decision quality. One of the most important elements of making a good decision is the information you have available to you. That includes learning how other people have solved similar problems, understanding your current context, and gaining more certainty about the future impact of any decision you make.
If you spend time gathering that kind of information about API management, you’ll be able to make better API management decisions. But if you spend too much time gathering information, you’ll never get a chance to learn by doing. When you’re dealing with the uncertainty of a complex adaptive system, the only reasonable way to progress is to take small bites out of your problem.
The best way to do that is to apply techniques like Deming’s PDSA cycle, introduced in “Incremental Improvement”. Use the data you have today and come up with a theory. Take that theory and plan an experiment. Find a safe place in your organization to try the experiment. Measure the results, and start again. You don’t need Agile processes, Lean methods, Kanban boards, DevOps tooling, or a microservice architecture to start managing your APIs. All those things are useful and have their place, but you don’t need them to get started. All you need is a theory, a good measurement, and a willingness to execute and experiment.
When it comes to a complex domain like API management, this is the best way to move forward—and the good news is you can start doing that right now. Find something in your API system that you think can be improved, and use what you’ve learned in this book to perform an experiment. Learn as you go and grow as you learn. Before you know it you’ll have an API management system that works for you as much as you’ve worked to build it.
It’s a long journey. But our experience, and that of most of the companies we’ve talked to, tells us that it doesn’t have to be a difficult one. If you’re armed with the API management knowledge that we’ve gathered in this book and have a willingness to search for a solution that fits your company’s unique needs, you’ll have a big advantage. Your path will be clearer, and you’ll have a much better chance of making progress.
And the more progress we make, the closer we can get to reaching our goals. And that is a good thing for everyone.