Continuous API Management

Chapter 11. Continuing the Journey

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API management is a complex subject, and we’ve had to cover a lot of ground in this book to explore it. We started by examining the foundational concept of API governance and what it means to do decision-based work. Focusing on decisions led us to a model of decision making with elements we could distribute or map. Mapping decisions gave us a powerful, nuanced way of managing API work.

With this foundation we started our journey by introducing the first important API management factor: the product perspective. Treating the API as a product gives you a guiding light for deciding which decisions matter the most. We started with this focus on a single API product because the context of local optimization was important and also easier to grasp than the complex landscape that would come later. We explored the local context of an API by taking a tour of the ten pillars of work (and decisions) that form an API product as well as the teams and culture that make that work happen.

With this local scope of API management in hand, we turned up the heat by introducing you to a second API management factor: time. Taking time into consideration meant that we needed to pay closer attention to how to manage changes to an API product, specifically in terms of the impact to the API’s users, maintainers, and owners. Thinking about an API over time also led us to an API product lifecycle ...