An increasing number of businesses are rightly treating APIs like fully-fledged products. In a sense, they are no different from any other software product: they share a lot of features, but they also come with the same set of challenges, especially when their number grows.

In fact, enterprise APIs may reach quantities that can be very hard to manage, since they can be generated by diverse groups of people who might produce APIs in different ways. If left unchecked, this can hinder reliability, discoverability and - most importantly - consistency, both at the design and delivery phase.

APIs act as a "glue" for software components, providing a communication channel between them, both within and without an enterprise. Both software components and interfaces can be very diverse. However, while system components might rely on legacy code and frameworks which can be difficult to change, APIs are more flexible by nature. Yet, too much flexibility might result in even more confusion if proper regulation is missing.

This is the reason businesses are investing more time and effort to create guidelines and standardize their API Governance model.

The key aspects of API Governance

The key purpose of API governance is providing consistency: API platforms should be designed to solve this problem at the root, ensuring a consistent experience across the whole ecosystem by applying the right rules and policies. To do this an API platform needs:

• centralization of resources and ease of discovery

• good communication, support, and documentation

• clear guidelines

• proper control of API usage

For a successful API Governance model, one of the most important prerequisites is the ease of discovery of your APIs. We’ve covered this aspect in detail in this dedicated post. Discovery isn’t enough, however, if the information on each API is lacking. A good API platform should store not only technical documentation (e.g., open API specification), but also information about the environments, functional documentation, and contact information about the owners and developers of APIs.

Furthermore, everyone in the ecosystem should be on the same page about the guidelines to follow, such as naming conventions of both APIs and endpoints, and even such things as syntax and letter cases to use.

Finally, access to APIs should be easily controlled, both to ensure security, but also for observability purposes. Good API governance should aim to make everything as observable as possible and should also provide reporting, activity monitoring and application performance management (APM). Observability is important because it can test how an API Governance program is performing against real data.

The API Lifecycle

We’ve talked about discovery, documentation, guidelines, and control, but there is one key aspect at the center of any governance program, and that’s processes.

Governing your APIs requires a well-defined (though flexible) lifecycle that is easy to grasp, whilst covering all the different stages of an API. These stages are akin to those of software development: planning, design, development, testing, deployment, maintenance, and eventually deprecation and retirement. Everyone in the API ecosystem should be able to tell in which phase of its lifecycle each API is at any time, to make an informed decision when choosing to use one.

A good lifecycle management plan allows to:

• follow a clear predefined path, avoiding mistakes.

• foster collaboration between stakeholders with different grants.

• implement versioning, deprecation, and retirement, while informing proactively all the appropriate stakeholders.

• react to metrics and improve if needed.

The more defined the phase path is, the better, as it averts mistakes. Furthermore, the ideal path of an API lifecycle should proceed with a guided dialogue between business owners and developers, where the advancements of the latter must be approved by the former.

Last, but not least, all involved parties should always be promptly notified of the advancements of an API in its lifecycle. That’s why a good notification system is a must to take API Governance to the next level.

Api Governance with ApiShare

ApiShare was born with all these good practices in mind. Consistency really does matter here, and everything from data model to user interface is made to give the end user a comprehensive view and quick access to the API ecosystem. Two clicks separate you from the creation of an API, and the lifecycle management guides you from the moment the mere idea for an API is proposed (the concept phase) to the final stages of an API, which are its deprecation, and eventually its retirement.

Aside for the more obvious information about where the API is deployed and how it can be used, proper governance suggest that a history of the lifecycle of an API should also be kept, and that’s exactly what ApiShare does, by keeping track of all the actions performed on an API and by whom, with comments besides.

As we mentioned before, a part of good API Governance is in good communication and documentation, and ApiShare guides you thought the process of filling in ownership information of an API as well as high level documentation.

Furthermore, ApiShare invites you to define its API’s contracts before their deployment in any environment. It also allows you to setup expected dates for deployment in each environment, as well as for deprecation and retirement. These dates can guide business owners and developers through the API lifecycle, but they also represent valuable information for consumers, especially considering that all involved stakeholders receive prompt and recurrent notifications about them, minimizing risks.

Last but not least, what about versioning? That’s a topic all its own which we have covered in detail here. Needless to say, proper governance of APIs must also come through the timely versioning of APIs, a practice all too often neglected.

Conclusions

Governance of APIs becomes a breeze when you have a tool that guides you through the whole process. Request a demo to discover more features, and to see first-hand how easy it is to elevate your enterprise assets into actual digital products with ApiShare.