API Lifecycle

About

This covers the full API lifecycle from design, development, deployment, consumption and management. The API lifecycle is the series of steps that teams must take in order to successfully design, develop, deploy, and consume APIs¹. Producers and consumers of APIs follow separate, but related API lifecycles.

MuleSoft API Lifecycle

MuleSoft provides the following API Lifecycle (for more see MuleSoft API Lifecycle ):

_API Lifecycle ©MuleSoft_

Postman API Lifecycle

Postman on the other hand, provides the following API Lifecycle (for more see Postman API Lifecycle ):

Benefits of a well-defined, stable, and clear API lifecycle management

1. Organisational alignment: helps team members stay on the same page - by establishing a common vocabulary for all API-related work within an organisation, helping the team communicate more effectively and improve morale by ensuring that everyone is working towards a shared goal
2. Increased productivity: helps the team to be more productive - by improving collaboration through reducing confusion and unnecessary work, which can lead to substantial and sustainable productivity gains
3. Better equipment of teams: helps teams to be better equipped to develop and deliver high-quality APIs - even at enterprise scale
4. Better API governance strategy: It is an essential part of an effective API governance strategy, as it lays the groundwork for stage-specific policies and processes that support collaboration and enable organisations to maximise the value of their API portifolio
5. API-first strategy implementation: Helps teams successfully implement the API-first strategy
6. Greater visibility: provides a clear roadmap for every API-related project, which gives leaders better visibility into an API’s trajectory, and lays the groundwork for an effective API monitoring strategy, which can be used to keep tabs on every API’s health, performance and usage

How a well-defined API lifecycle supports the API-first approach

APIs are used by teams to deliver applications designed and built as a collection of internal and external services, through the API-first or API-led approach. This has led to a widespread proliferation of private, partner, and public APIs that help organisations unlock new features and advance their business goals.

As APIs multiply and evolve, there is need to follow a well-define the API lifecycle since it has become increasingly difficult to ensure that each API is highly performant, secure, and able to meet consumer needs. Therefore, a well-defined lifecycle, which identifies the owners, governance policies, and tools for each stage, establishes a shared understanding and vocabulary for API-led work. This helps in making sure the team is on the same page and consistently develop high-quality APIs - even at enterprise scale.

API Lifecycle Roles & Responsibilities

Different organisation assign different resources depending on the organisation’s maturity. One person or multiple people may handle all the responsibilities. However, each stage of the API lifecycle provides specific value, ensuring application building blocks provide desired business outcomes.

1. API manager - oversees the API across the full lifecycle in smaller organisations
2. API analyst and admin - cover design in robust organisations
3. DevOps, integration developer & application network architect - handle implementation
4. API admin - cover management

API Management for Application network

Businesses need to make decisions quickly in today’s competitive landscape. This is brought about through flexibility by building purposeful, agile application building blocks that can easily be pieced together with well-designed, well-managed APIs to quickly created what is needed. An application network is created by connecting these building blocks in a network of interchangeable functionality or a network of sub-functions or applications. This helps in future-proofing and protecting the organisation against uncertainty by creating these building blocks. You can then allow flexibility to rapidly piece them together on an on-demand basis.

This application network is composed of application building blocks made up of multiple elements, with separate purposes or by separating concerns between each element. The API interface, API implementation and API management aspects all have unique lifecycles to follow, with the building block itself being treated as a product since these characteristics are common to what a good product should also have.

Anki

Links

• MuleSoft

References