Even though you can't see them, APIs are vital to our digital experiences. They bridge gaps between discrete chunks of code, enabling developers to build powerful, interconnected applications that seamlessly integrate and communicate with each other.
To deliver a high-quality product, developer teams follow a series of steps to design, develop, deploy, and consume APIs. This process is known as the API lifecycle.
An inefficient API lifecycle can have significant consequences for developers and consumers:
Unclear documentation, inconsistent interfaces, and frequent changes can make integration and development more challenging and time-consuming.
Integration challenges, delayed updates, and slow response times can hinder the consumer experience.
Fortunately, developer teams can prevent these issues by implementing effective API design and management practices. To learn more about how to ensure a smooth and cost-effective API lifecycle, we spoke with Kevin Swiber, Senior API Strategy Lead at Postman, the world’s largest public API hub.
Today, we'll cover 3 lessons from the team at Postman to help you optimize the API lifecycle for developers and consumers.
Design and Build Great Web APIs
At the start of this course, you’ll be introduced to a handful of important practices and principles for designing and building APIs that are robust, reliable, and resilient. You’ll also acquire skills in a wide range of developer tools, including tools for design, documentation, building, testing, security, and deployment. You'll learn the best practices for modeling an APIs lifecycle using Donald Norman’s action lifecycle. Then, you’ll learn how to use the sequence diagram for designing APIs and describing them using ALPS. For sketching an API, you will learn about Gehry's sketches. You will also cover OpenAPI and SwaggerHub for API mocking. Moreover, the usage of DARRT and NodeJS will be covered for building APIs. You'll finish with learning how to use the Postman for testing APIs and then deploy them using Heroku. By the end of this course, you will have an in-depth understanding of how to make fully functional efficient APIs from its inception to its deployment.
1. Use OpenAPI to define your structure
In today's API platform landscape, many developers are embracing a design-first approach. This means that before writing other code, developers partner with stakeholders to model an API that enables seamless integration with internal and external applications.
To implement a design-first approach, start by defining the structure of your API. You can do this through OpenAPI Specification.
OpenAPI is an open standard for defining and documenting the capabilities, structure, and behavior of web APIs. It allows you to identify the structure of your RESTful API, including the shape of requests and responses, before building it.
When you create a blueprint with OpenAPI, you can gather feedback and refine the API structure as needed. This allows you to optimize for consumer needs without wasting developer resources on an ineffective design.
2. Recognize that change requires a combination of people, process, and technology
When developer teams encounter issues with their API lifecycle, they often try to resolve them with technical solutions. However, technology can only get you so far. To make meaningful improvements, it's also important to:
Change processes to accommodate the technology.
Consult the right people to help inform decisions.
Through a combination of people, process, and technology, you can create efficiencies in the API lifecycle while maintaining a high level of quality and security.
One of the best ways to transform your processes (and ensure the right people are in the room) is to create a producer lifecycle map. This outlines the steps developers take to design, build, and deploy APIs.
For each lifecycle phase, it can be helpful to identify:
Owner and relevant stakeholders
Technology used
Steps taken
Depending on the size of your organization, this map can be as simple as a drawing on a whiteboard. What matters is that you gain visibility into the steps, technologies, and stakeholders in your producer lifecycle. From there, you can brainstorm ways to reduce rework and redundancies.
3. Support the producer and consumer lifecycles
The API lifecycle refers to how APIs flow through our software development lifecycle. When we think about the phases of software development, we often focus on the producer lifecycle. To make sure APIs work for consumers, we need to give equal attention to the consumer lifecycle.
One of the most crucial parts of the API lifecycle is where the producer and consumer sides meet. As a team, you can support consumer needs throughout the lifecycle by asking:
How do we distribute APIs so that they can be discovered?
How do we enable users to integrate the API platform into their environment?
How do we gather feedback from consumers to improve APIs going forward?
These questions can help you develop quantitative and qualitative metrics to assess the consumer experience. Metrics might include:
Time to first call
Time to first integration
Developer satisfaction survey
You can use this data, along with techniques like user journey mapping, to identify potential improvements in the producer and consumer lifecycles.
Ultimately, the most successful API developers approach the API lifecycle with a product mindset. Consumers aren't faceless entities at the end of your API. They are developers whose pain you need to understand and solve.
For more tips on how to build robust APIs that perform, scale, and adapt over time, check out our full conversation with the Postman team.
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