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API-Aware

Once an organization begins to wake up to the potential of being API-first, it starts investing in a strategy for producing and consuming APIs in alignment with business objectives. The company becomes more aware of the APIs that already exist and the life cycle that is moving them forward (or possibly holding them back).

Elements

  • Strategy - Teams have come together, acknowledging that an API strategy is needed.A formal document has been drafted, but leaders are just getting started in deciding how to proceed.
  • Discovery - A central API catalog exists within the enterprise and for public engagement, but the APIs are never quite up-to-date, not reflecting what is happening in production.
  • Applications - Teams building applications have begun doing more planning and communication before developing web or mobile applications, resulting in better coordination.
  • Visibility - An API management solution exists to handle the publishing of public APIs, but the process for securing them is undeveloped.
  • Quality - Some teams have gotten a handle on testing their APIs, but there’s still a lot of work to do when it comes to test coverage and overall API reliability.
  • Security - The organization has a central security group and is doing API security reviews, but teams producing the APIs see the process as too slow and heavy-handed.
  • Productivity - Teams are able to discover APIs developed across the organization and are exposed to development by other teams, increasing productivity, but these processes still need more work.
  • Velocity - APIs are more discoverable by teams, including where teams are getting work done. The organization has invested heavily in hardening CI/CD workflows, releasing new iterations more often.
  • Observability - Teams are using existing APM solutions to understand the health of their APIs. They are routing monitoring data into APMs, building dashboards, and understanding the state of their APIs.
  • Governance - A centralized group has come together and begun defining guidelines, standards, and rules teams can use to help produce more consistent APIs.
  • Standards - More IETF, IANA, and other Internet standards are making their way into the design of APIs, and more reusable patterns are beginning to be shared across teams.
  • Regulations - Regulatory compliance is beginning to become less daunting now that the enterprise landscape is coming into focus. The organization has a map showing teams where data is located.
  • Innovations - Teams are beginning to find more bandwidth due to productivity gains. They are starting to feel they have more time to play around with new technologies.

API awareness breeds more API awareness. Organizations find their initial investments in discovery, quality, and governance begin to snowball, leading to more collaboration and coordination, with tooling, processes, and knowledge and shifting the enterprise towards becoming API-first.

The API-aware stage is where you begin to see the transformational properties of APIs at the domain and organizational level. APIs can do a lot in a single application or integration, but it is at the collective organizational level that they will have the greatest impact on how the enterprise operates.