Continuous API Management

Chapter 4. The Ten Pillars of an API Product

When it’s done well, it does look easy. People have no idea how complicated and difficult it really is. When you think of a movie, most people imagine a two hour finished, polished product. But to get to that two hour product, it can take hundreds or thousands of people many months of full time work.

George Kennedy

In the last chapter we established the perspective of treating the API as a product. Now let’s take a look at the work you’ll need to do to build and maintain your product. The truth is that it takes a lot of hard work to develop a good API. In Chapter 1, you learned that APIs have three different parts: interfaces, implementations, and instances. To create your API you’ll need to put time and effort into managing all three of those aspects. On top of that, you’ll need to keep everything up to date as your product continually matures and changes. To help you understand and manage all of that complexity, we’ve divided this body of work into a set of ten pillars.

We call them pillars because of the way they support your API product. If you don’t invest in any pillars, your product is doomed to fall and fail. But that doesn’t mean all the pillars need maximum investment for your API to succeed. The nice thing about having ten pillars is that they don’t all have to carry the same amount of weight. Some pillars can be stronger than others, and you can even decide that some pillars don’t need much investment at all. The important ...