The challenge of API management: API strategies for decentralized API landscapes

Abstract

The Web as the world's largest information system has largely settled on a solid foundation of HTTP-based connectivity, and the representation of User Interface (UI) information resources through a mix of HTML and scripting. In contrast, the similarly rapidly evolving “Web of Services” is still based on a more diverse and more quickly evolving set of approaches and technologies. This can make architectural decisions harder when it comes to choosing on how to expose information and services through an Application Programming Interface (API). This challenge becomes even more pronounced when organizations are faced with developing strategies for managing constantly growing and evolving API landscapes. This tutorial takes participants through two different journeys. The first one is a journey discussing API styles and API technologies, comparing and contrasting them as a way to highlight the fact that there is no such thing as the one best choice. The goal of this first journey is to provide an overview of how APIs are used nowadays in research and in industry. The second journey discusses the question of how to define an API strategy, which focuses both on helping teams to make effective choices about APIs in a given context, and on how to manage that context over time when large organizations nowadays have thousands of APIs, which will continue to evolve constantly.