Scaling Your API Design Workflow

Earlier this year, Jakub Nesetril, CEO of Heavybit member company Apiary, gave a presentation titled ‘Scaling Your API Design Workflow’ at the SF Microservices Meetup in the Heavybit clubhouse. We followed up with Jakub to get further thoughts from him on the biggest lessons Apiary has learned around scaling your API workflows. If you’re interested in hearing more from Jakub on API design, he’ll be speaking at our upcoming DevGuild: Developer Product Design event.

These days, software development is faster paced than ever before, and it’s laser focused on rapid iteration, continuous delivery pipelines, and automating away the boring parts.

One increasingly popular strategy is to keep your code small, light, and independent from itself. This migration from monolithic architecture to microservices is going through a renaissance these days, or perhaps a second renaissance if you consider the early 2000’s service-oriented architecture movement as its first era.

When you combine microservices with increasingly rapid development processes, it’s easy to find yourself buried under a complete mess of APIs, each different from the next. At Apiary we’ve observed that as the number of internal APIs increases, even the most seasoned architects can easily become overwhelmed by the complexity they present.

That’s why the ‘design-first’ or ‘contract-first’ approach is sweeping the API landscape. Not only does it help nip much of the inconsistency and complexity in the bud, it also helps automate away the most routine parts of API development like prototyping, testing, and documentation.

At Apiary we’ve analyzed hundreds of thousands of API projects, and from these we’ve selected our Top 5 API Commandments that should help you in your transition from monolith to microservices.

These commandments are: Standardize, Automate, Version “less”, Embrace (your customers), and Decouple. Follow these 5 rules, and you’ll be S.A.V.E.D. For a deeper look at these commandments, watch my full talk below.

Sign up here to attend the next SF Microservices Meetup, and if you’re interested in hearing more from Jakub on API design, he’ll be speaking at our upcoming DevGuild: Developer Product Design event.