HOW

From idea to implemetation

DEFINE

Your requirements

Your functional requirements represent what it is that you like your API to do. What business capabilities does the API expose to its consuming clients? Who is your audience: internal developers, external consumers, or both? What data and functions around these data does it make accessible? Your non-functional requirements will typically be a mix of security, controlled access and service level concerns such as performance, availability, response time. It also includes concerns with regard to data protection and downstream systems integrity.

DEVELOP

From Swagger to proxies

Besides giving your API product a meaningful name and useful description, it’s important to define operations for what your API will do. We specify the data models that describe the request and response messages. We capture the API interface using a service description language. To describe RESTful APIs, we can use Swagger. We create an API product from scratch which exposes (‘proxies’) an existing resource. We implement applicable security constraints (security policies) and ensure proper caching, rate limiting, and other types of behavior. After we’ve developed your API, it’s time to test it in a test environment.

IMPLEMENT

Let’s deploy

Once your API has been tested and reviewed, it can be deployed in production. Enterprise APIs, including cloud APIs, are typically hosted on API gateways that ensure the expected performance, security, and scalability requirements are met. To facilitate adoption of the API, we publish it in an API developer portal. We provide clear documentation that describes API functions and applicable use cases. We clearly explain any API security constraints that may apply and we indicate which ‘consumption plans’ are offered, if any.

MANAGE

Keep on running

After we’ve tested and deployed/published your API product, the work isn’t done. We now need to monitor your API to understand how it’s being used and how it performs. We monitor availability, response time and throughput as well as metrics such as developer engagement and consumption overview. In addition, API products will be subject to regular updates.