The best practices to implement an API Management project

Many people asked me over the past few months what are the best practices to implement an API management project and I decided to share in a series of articles a few important guidelines to succeed in such a critical project for your company.
The series will cover the following topics:

• API design with an API-first approach
• Infrastructure design
• API development
• API security (read APIs and security, what you need to know)
• API Catalog

Impacts of an API Management project

Before starting, let’s have a quick look at how the API Management project will impact and benefit your IT organization.

• Benefit 1: This will separate organizations who develop the APIs and manage them. The former are usually managed by the technical teams whereas the latter is managed by the business ops teams.
• Benefit 2: This will provide a catalog of services (either REST APIs or SOAP Web services) for better control, search and re-usability. API documentation is part of the catalog features.
• Benefit 3: API administrators will be able to control access to those APIs. Access can be defined granular by the organization and by consuming application.
• Benefit 4: IT and business owners will be able to industrialize the API discovery and consumption process to engage with a large developer community that can register and consume APIs in a self-service mode through an API Portal.

Who are the API management main personas?

• The end Users—End users who will access the organization resources, that is the business data, via a mobile app or a partner app for example.
• The Consumer Application developers—Those are the developers who are accessing APIs and develop applications. They are grouped by partner organization or are simply part of a larger anonymous community.
• The API Managers—They register new APIs to the catalog, assign rights to partner organizations and adequate to define security rules.
  
• The API Developers—They develop the APIs out of the existing systems (either service bus, application servers, mainframes, messaging systems, files …).
  
• The Resource Managers—They are the IT people in charge of the business data. The API developers need to interact with them to get access to the resources they need.

More details coming next in the article series …