Do You Know What APIs Your Teams Are Working On?

Can you confidently answer the following question: What APIs are the teams across your enterprise working on today?

We are investing heavily into work on an API discovery solution based upon the work of the API Evangelist, and on the API Gallery over the last year. As part of this continued work, we are speaking with different enterprise groups about their needs when it comes to API discovery within the enterprise. Asking teams how they find and search for APIs, how they catalog them, and how they maintain an understanding of what different teams are developing, and managing in production. Understanding what the honest picture is when it comes to API discovery at the team level, and where groups are needing the most assistance.

Most groups we talked with couldn’t accurately define what APIs each team possessed. Teams have been so busy, working to support what is already available in operations, and address any new requests that come their way over the years, documenting, cataloging, and sharing meta data around APIs in development and operations just hasn’t been a priority. It is just the reality in many large organizations, and a problem that needs to be addressed before enterprise groups are able to move forward with their API strategy. Streamdata.io is engaging with enterprise groups to discuss the need for event-driven API infrastructure, but before these teams are ready for these conversations, they have to possess a robust stack of well known, well defined, and designed APIs.

If enterprise leadership can’t clearly articulate what API resources each team is working on, and possess as part of their regular operations, they aren’t going to be able to orchestrate across existing API infrastructure, and evolve to the point where they are responding to real-time events and signals across everything that is happening on a daily basis. This vital link is why we consider API discovery to be an essential ingredient that needs to be in place before an enterprise organization will be ready to invest in an event-driven approach to moving their digital assets around. You just can’t tap into real-time signals and events if you don’t know where all of your APIs are. If you can’t clearly articulate what a teams API resources are, you won’t be able to define the meaningful events happening across that teams API infrastructure.

Visibility into what other teams are working on is essential to healthy API operations. If teams aren’t actively accounting for, defining, and then sharing their strategy around API operations, there will never be any heightened awareness of what they offer, let alone being able to articulate the most valuable events that occur across what they offer. Something that concerns us as we are looking to generate leads, and ultimately sales of our event-driven API infrastructure–Streamdata.io Distribute. Forcing us to invest more into the world of API discovery, helping our customers clearly define what each team is working on, while actively distributing data and orchestrating infrastructure as needed to maximize the efficient and reach of what each team brings to the table.