Oracle has announced plans to acquire Apiary. This builds on the recent trend of vendor consolidation within the API space. Other prominent examples of this include Apigee’s acquisition by Google, and 3scale by Red Hat. This trend of API vendor consolidation is a strong indicator of the growing criticality of APIs as enablers of business growth and technical agility. But developing a good API program, by itself, is no easy task. Rigorously managing the entire API lifecycle - from design and development to deployment and retirement - has become a crucial engineering concern to build and deliver reliable API solutions. As vendor consolidation becomes increasingly prevalent in the API space, API teams need to be declarative about their requirements to ensure reliable, secure, and performant APIs. Here are some important considerations when planning your API lifecycle strategy.
Robust API Framework Support
An API development platform for managing the API lifecycle should have concrete support for an industry-accepted framework for developing APIs. With many dependent digital strategies relying on APIs, implementing them requires a solid framework. Swagger, for example, has become the world's most reliable API framework in helping organizations better plan and implement their API strategy. While a lot of vendors do boast support for important frameworks, the extent to which they facilitate developing concrete solutions in these framework varies. Understanding the granularity of this support can greatly accelerate your organization's API development.
End-to-end API Lifecycle Support
API development encompasses a wide spectrum of development tasks, and a good API Lifecycle Platform must be equipped to orchestrate all of these aspects. This allows for efficient synchronization for various teams and functions within the organizational workflow. A good workflow that covers the entire lifecycle can help in building APIs efficiently for executing on quick go-to-market strategies, an important game changer for a lot of organizations.
Platform-agnostic Development
Having an API development platform that that gives developers the flexibility to integrate with their ever evolving internal and external environments is one of the most important things to keep in mind when evaluating vendors. As an increasingly number of products get acquired and consolidated, there’s always a risk of vendor lockdown. There are positives as well as negatives to this, and having a platform that offers the freedom to tie into the toolset of your choice can provide better resonance between your business and IT objectives. At the end of the day, the right API development platform boils down to your organization’s maturity and stage in the API lifecycle.
SwaggerHub is an API development platform, that allows organizations to orchestrate their entire API lifecycle. SwaggerHub was built by the core Swagger team to be the platform for all things Swagger. It brings together the core capabilities of all the main Swagger tools with advanced features that allow organizations to build, document, and deploy concrete API solutions.
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