Continuous API Management, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11. Managing the API Lifecycle in an Evolving Landscape

Many drops make a bucket, many buckets make a pond, many ponds make a lake, and many lakes make an ocean.

Percy Ross

Ideally, if you’ve been following along in the book up to this point, you’ve noticed that there are some key differences between managing the lifecycle of a single API and managing the lifecycle of an entire landscape of APIs. In, fact, it is our experience that companies that notice—and act according to—this important distinction between “the one” and “the many” are the companies that have the best chance of long-term success in their digital transformation efforts.

In this chapter, we’ll touch briefly on these differences and then dive into the lifecycle pillars we introduced in Chapter 4—this time, we’ll focus on the landscape (the many, as introduced in Chapter 9) instead of the API (the one). This should give you some perspective on how the challenges of scope, scale, and standards we discussed in Chapter 1 come into play when you are growing your API ecosystem.

Along the way, we’ll return to the eight Vs of the API landscape (introduced in Chapter 9 and refined in Chapter 10) and touch on some of the decision-making elements to employ (described in Chapter 2). Bringing all these elements together will help you gain a point of view on how you can best apply these patterns and practices in your teams, for your products, in a way that fits your company’s culture and values.

But, before we revisit ...