When we are on the ground at organizations conducting API strategy workshops, we are always fascinated with the many different ways in which enterprise groups actually deploy APIs. Some are still hand building and deploying their APIs in a variety of programming languages, while others are relying on gateway, or cloud solutions to get the job done. Rarely do we find a single way of getting things done within any single organization. While IT may have some standard ways of doing things, different business and development groups tend to bring their own approaches to the table, making for a hodge podge of API deployment practices, resulting in a pretty chaotic API landscape.
To help us understand what is happening within an enterprise organization when it comes to how APIs are actually developed and deployed, we have a short set of questions we ask early on in our engagement, helping flesh out what is happening on the ground:
– How many API gateways do you use to deploy APIs?
– What programming languages do you use to deploy APIs?
– Do you deploy APIs on-premise?
– Do you deploy APIs in the cloud?
– Do you deploy APIs in multiple clouds?
– Do you use containers to deploy your APIs?
– Do you use a CI/CD pipeline to deploy your APIs?
– Do you have webhook implementations to support APIs?
– Do you have any streaming APIs available for consumers?
These questions are meant to identify how far along an enterprise organization is in their overall API journey, but more specifically they work to understand how efficient, structured, and sophisticated the delivery of digital services is within a large group. It is just nine questions, but they specifically get at the maturity of how APIs are delivered across teams, helping shine some light on this often dark and chaotic stop along the API lifecycle.
These API deployment questions are just the beginning of a wider survey we conduct when getting to know an enterprise organization in preparation for one of our Streamdata.io Journey workshops. If you are interested in seeing the full questionnaire, or learning more about our API workshops, feel free to connect. Streamdata.io is all about event-driven API infrastructure, but we are also about ensuring your enterprise organization is ready for event-driven API infrastructure, and sometimes that takes some investment in other areas along the API lifecycle, before you are ready.
