Software life cycle management is becoming more critical for today’s technology-fueled organizations—because you can’t just release software into the world and expect it to work perfectly for years to come. More often than not, development teams must constantly adapt their software, progressively add features and cater to new use cases as they arise. This is nothing new for web APIs, which are prone to continual evolution and whose integrations require regular upkeep to avoid breaking changes.
As such, the discipline of API life cycle management has gathered steam. This concept focuses not only on the design and development of APIs, but on the entire life cycle, including testing, monitoring, documentation, maintenance, versioning, CI/CD and even deprecation. Localizing a strategy for API life cycle management from the get-go can increase the longevity and usability of a platform. It also helps software providers treat their APIs as an iterable product rather than a one-and-done offshoot of a digital platform.
I recently met with Rakshith Rao, co-founder and CEO of APIwiz, to gather insights on standardizing API management across an organization. According to Rao, there are many ways to implement governance to make these interfaces more consistent. For example, automated security analysis, contract-driven development and implementing style guides are just a few ways to wrangle an increasingly extensive API portfolio. Below, we’ll review these tips and others to consider how to best manage API life cycles, hopefully, before sprawl sets in.
Four Tips to Increase API Governance
Medium-to-large organizations might be handling thousands of APIs, said Rao. This new paradigm brings many opportunities for digital transformation, but it can also be a nightmare to manage. Too often, APIs aren’t built with tangible business requirements taking center stage.
Many of these initiatives didn’t begin with consistent policies from the get-go. For example, it’s also easy to skip out on documenting internal services. But, fractured practices harm discovery and reusability. To rectify this issue, Rao shared many ways in which technical leads can promote better API hygiene.
Enable Visibility of API Usage With API Monitoring
The API life cycle spans stages of design, deployment, deprecation and eventual retirement. And throughout this life cycle, developers will likely release new versions of the same service. But although you want consumers to adopt the latest version, some large organizations must support legacy versions for years to come, explained Rao. As a result, different API versions are often developed and run simultaneously by various internal or partner teams. Sometimes, “no one turned the tap off and the water’s still running,” he said.
To enhance visibility for all active (and non-active) sessions, it’s important to conduct ongoing monitoring. This will help discover individual client usage patterns and help avoid shadow or zombie APIs from forming. These forgotten endpoints could pose security vulnerabilities, said Rao, as you might not enforce best practices on older versions if you don’t know they exist.
Automate Security Analysis to Capture Vulnerabilities at the Design Level
Not having consistency between APIs could pose data compliance issues. One method to avoid errors is to conduct design reviews on an ongoing basis, and to automate this security analysis at the design level, said Rao. Perhaps authentication tokens need to be encoded, logging requests aren’t coming in, or payloads are structured incorrectly. Whatever the case, having a complete checklist to scan and performing ongoing security analysis early on to catch these inconsistencies can be a big boon to overall governance and long-term cybersecurity.
Adopt Style Guides but Allow for Flexibility
Very simple data modeling errors could severely impact a system, said Rao. Thus, it’s in an organization’s best interest to use standard taxonomies and ensure data governance is an overall aspect of life cycle management. One way to ensure consistency is by using specification-driven development—OpenAPI is a common standard for this need.
Rao also suggested developing API design style guidelines but admitted that these guides become challenging to enforce and limit as an organization scales. This is because various teams in different departments will have different API needs and often design their interfaces for various front-end requirements. His takeaway is to centralize practices but take a GUI approach to configuring and sharing them. This way, API style can be “minimally intrusive but uniformly enforced.”
Use an Abstraction Layer for Multi-Cloud
A full 98% percent of enterprises are using at least two cloud infrastructure providers, according to a recent Oracle report. Nearly everyone is adopting a multi-cloud strategy, but this new reality brings novel pressures for DevOps, especially when overseeing the deployment of APIs across different cloud platforms. An API life cycle management platform decoupled from these CSPs could help wrangle polyglot deployments.
Sticky Notes Aren’t Enough for API Management
API life cycle management goes well beyond the development and runtime phase. And as more API-first development occurs within organizations, maintaining standard interfaces will naturally require more effort. Rao also advocates for increased infrastructure automation and low-code solutions to meet these new challenges. Automating various parts of the API life cycle so there is less manual work “helps to bring down the guesswork of ensuring reliability when you release an API,” said Rao.
We’re seeing some enterprises move from supporting hundreds to thousands of APIs. In this new paradigm, “API sprawl is imminent,” said Rao. As such, it will become virtually impossible to manually keep these interfaces in line, understating the need for more automation. Especially during times of economic uncertainty and leanness in the tech market, the democratization of such API management automation will be vital in helping organizations move faster.
Having broken pieces of information and scattered API contracts will lead to a messy and potentially insecure adoption. As such, API management can no longer be done using sticky notes on the edge of a computer screen, said Rao. Taking the guesswork out, centralizing common policies and shifting more legwork behind the scenes will be required to avoid a splintered portfolio of services.
