Preface
As society and business have grown increasingly digital in nature, the demand for connected software has exploded. In turn, the application programming interface (API) has emerged as an important resource for modern organizations because it facilitates software connections. But managing these APIs effectively has proven a new challenge. Getting the best value from your APIs means learning how to manage their design, development, deployment, growth, quality, and security while dealing with the complicating factors of context, time, and scale.
Who Should Read This Book
If you are just starting to build an API program and want to understand the work ahead of you, or if you already have APIs but want to learn how to manage them better, then this is the book for you.
In this book, we’ve tried to build an API management framework that can be applied to more than one context. In these pages you’ll find guidance that will help you to manage a single API that you want to share with developers around the world, as well as advice for building a complex set of APIs in a microservice architecture designed only for internal developers—and everything in between.
We’ve also written this book to be as technologically neutral as possible. The advice and analysis we provide is applicable to any API-based architecture, including HTTP CRUD, REST, GraphQL, and event-driven styles of interaction. This is a book for anyone who wants to improve the decisions being made about their APIs.
What’s in This Book
This book contains our collective knowledge from many years spent designing, developing, and improving APIs—both our own and others’. We’ve distilled all that experience into this book. We’ve identified two core factors for effective API development: adopting a product perspective and implementing the right kind of team. We’ve also identified three essential factors for managing that work: governance, product maturity, and landscape design.
These five elements of API management form a foundation on which you can build a successful API management program. In this book, we introduce each of these topics and provide you with guidance on how to shape them to fit your own organizational context.
The Outline
We’ve organized the book so that the scope of management concerns grows as you progress through the chapters. We start by introducing the foundational concepts of decision-based governance and the API as a product. This is followed by a tour of all the work that must be managed when building an API product.
From this simple view of a single API, we then add the aspect of time as we dive into what it means to change an API and how the maturity of the API impacts those change decisions. This is followed by an exploration of the teams and people who do that change work. Finally in the last half of the book we tackle the complexities of scale and the challenges of managing a landscape of API products.
Here is a short summary of what you’ll find in each chapter:
Chapter 1 introduces the API management domain and explains why it’s so difficult to manage APIs effectively.
Chapter 2 explores governance from the perspective of decision-based work—a foundational concept for API management.
Chapter 3 establishes the API-as-a-Product perspective and why it’s an essential part of any API strategy.
Chapter 4 outlines the ten essential pillars of work in the API product domain. These pillars form a set of decision-making tasks that must be managed.
Chapter 5 provides insight into what it means to change an API continuously. It introduces the need to adopt a continuous change mentatlity and provides an understanding of the different types of API changes (and their impacts) that you’ll encounter.
Chapter 6 introduces the API product lifecycle, a framework that will help you manage API work across the ten pillars over the life of an API product.
Chapter 7 addresses the people element of an API management system by exploring the typical roles, responsibilities, and design patterns for an API team over the life of an API product.
Chapter 8 adds the perspective of scale to the problem of managing APIs. It introduces the eight Vs—variety, vocabulary, volume, velocity, vulnerability, visibility, versioning, and volatility—that must be addressed when multiple APIs are changing at the same time.
Chapter 9 outlines a continuous landscape design approach for managing API changes continuously and at scale.
Chapter 10 maps the landscape perspective back to the API-as-a-Product perspective and identifies how API work changes when the landscape evolves around it.
Chapter 11 ties together the story of API management that has emerged and provides advice on preparing for the future and starting your journey today.
What’s Not in This Book
The scope of API management is big, and there is a massive amount of variation in contexts, platforms, and protocols. Given the constraints of time and space when writing a book, it was impossible for us to address all the specific implementation practices of API work. This book isn’t a guide for designing a REST API, or for picking a security gateway product. If you are looking for a prescriptive guide to writing API code or designing an HTTP API, this isn’t the right book for you.
While we do have examples that talk about specific practices, this isn’t an API implementation–focused book (the good news is there are plenty of books, blogs, and videos available already to help you fill that need). Instead, this book tackles a problem that is rarely addressed: how to effectively manage the work of building APIs within a complex, continuously changing organizational system.
Conventions Used in This Book
The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
- Italic
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Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.
Constant width-
Indicates program elements such as variable or function names, data types, statements, and keywords.
Constant width italic-
Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.
Tip
This element signifies a tip or suggestion.
Note
This element signifies a general note.
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This element indicates a warning or caution.
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Acknowledgments
We have lots of people to thank for all the help and support we received over the last year as we worked through early outlines, drafts, and edits of this book. First, thanks to all the people we interviewed and consulted with, and who attended our workshops. We got great feedback and excellent advice from each and every encounter. Additional thanks go to the folks at CA Technologies who supported us over the years and helped make all those workshops and onsite visits possible. Special thanks to the people who read through our early drafts and helped us shape the final book you see here. Matt McLarty, James Higginbotham, and Chris Wood all took time out of their own busy schedules to read and review our work and point out places where it could be better. Finally, our big thanks to the team at O’Reilly Media. Thanks to Alicia Young, Justin Billing, and all the folks at O’Reilly for all their efforts to turn our initial ideas into the book you see before you now.