Continuous API Management

Chapter 9. API Landscape Journey

The real problem is that programmers have spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times; premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.

Donald Knuth

In Chapter 8 we looked at API landscapes in depth, focusing on the foundations and key aspects. We will now move on to discuss what it means for API landscapes to become more mature. As we have done so far, we will consider this a journey rather than a destination: an API landscape is never “fully mature,” as it will always continue to evolve, following the evolution of technologies and the maturity journeys of individual API products (as discussed in Chapter 6).

Evoking an analogy that we have used previously, this view of API landscapes is similar to the ongoing evolution of the web. The web is never “fully mature” either: new technology developments, new scenarios, and new usage patterns continuously feed its evolution. While this may seem daunting, it is exactly this continuous evolution that is the reason for the web’s success over time. Without it, the web would have become irrelevant at some point, and a different approach would have taken over.

In the same way as the web is continuously evolving, API landscapes must continuously evolve as well. Continuous architecting lays the groundwork for this, making sure that architecture itself can evolve in response to changing needs and evolving principles, protocols, ...