What is API Governance?
A growing number of companies are integrating APIs with their applications and systems. In a recent survey, the average number of APIs per company increased by 221% in 12 months, with 26% of companies using at least twice as many APIs as they did a year ago. With the rapid increase in the use of APIs, and companies leaning towards API-driven business strategies, the need for proper API governance is becoming much more important.
What is API Governance?
The practice of API governance refers to the process of the application of a set of standard rules and procedures, by the necessary stakeholders, regarding API standards, usage and security. By governing APIs, policies, rules and conventions are created that enable the appropriate parties to work independently but effectively together. The rules in reference are applied using validations and checks and involve putting in place a model that utilizes reusable and centralized objects. The policies, on the other hand, help solve the challenges surrounding integration, deprecation, versioning, tracking, and documentation.
The main goal of API governance is to put in place a system that allows the parties involved to work independently of one another with a set goal being the result. Also, consistency is another key goal of API governance as it ensures API usage remains consistent whenever they are required to be used. With regards to advantages, API governance:
● Is time and cost-effective
● Allows reuse of components
● Ensures APIs are built proactively and in a goal-oriented manner
● Aids in maintaining data integrity and security
● Helps in workflow automation and customization
● Enables full visibility of APIs in use by an organization
Challenges
As the world continues to shift to using APIs, particularly with regard to using them as microservices to applications, the need to adopt the best practices for API governance becomes ever more important. Adopting the right API governance policies is not always a smooth ride, with a number of challenges arising that can hinder the smooth adoption of these policies.
These challenges range from documentation, visibility, orchestration, versioning and security to monetization, re-engineering for the cloud and a lack of reusability. They basically serve as items on a list that need to be ticked off when setting up good API governance policies. These challenges can be overcome by adopting dynamic and robust API governance policies that not only ensure that each challenge is addressed thoroughly, but also that API usage remains scalable, resilient and secure.
Best Practices of API Governance
When adopting policies surrounding API governance, the best practices to adopt are:
● Centralization: The number one best practice concerning API governance is the creation of a central point where policies are created and enacted. This allows for transparency and seamless adoption of policies across all other aspects of an organization.
● Style Guidelines: Having a standardized guideline for APIs ensures consistency and often creates a unique template for API creation, usage and adoption. The most notable way to go about this is by having a style guide that can be adopted with ease to ensure style consistency across APIs.
● Create role-based access control (RBAC): Role-based access control restricts access based on a person’s role within an organization. To put into better perspective, creating access control based on individual roles when it comes to APIs helps create a good layer of security and ensures that only the users with the right privilege have access to critical APIs. This potentially prevents privilege escalation in a case where a breach occurs.
● Reusability: Asides from ensuring a standardized API design structure to enable consistency, it is also important that they are reusable. Not all APIs should be built for one-time use and should have reusable components. This creates a standard framework and makes it easy to build upon already existing APIs and reduces the time needed to build APIs from scratch.
● Automation: Automation has steadily become a key aspect of software integration and interaction. When it comes to APIs, several tools can automate contracts, tracking and documentation processes to ensure overall standardized API governance practices.
● Establish a dynamic versioning scheme: By using versioning, developers can keep track of and maintain different API versions. Deprecating an old version of an API when a new one is released can be done with versioning. API governance plays a key role in versioning by determining the backward compatibility of an API and, in a case where compatibility isn’t possible, commissioning a new version of an API. Versioning and compatibility prevent breakage when APIs are deployed and also supports major and minor patching when necessary.
● Adopting a dynamic approach to managing APIs: This API governance practice involves first holding APIs as abstract designs rather than lines of code. This allows for the technical details such as payloads, headers and parameters to be held to specific use cases to ensure that they are easily applied during the development lifecycle of APIs.
Secondly, APIs should be held as part of a holistic catalog incorporating proper organization and classification. This aids in adding an extra layer of visualization that monitors who uses the APIs, where they are used, who owns them and what data flows through them.
Conclusion
API governance represents a key aspect of the overall API life cycle. It is highly recommended that organizations review their API governance policies to ensure that they are up to date with standards. These policies serve as guides to ensure that APIs remain consistent, reusable, automated and dynamic in their versioning and management.
Adopting standardized API governance policies also aids API security, leading to the proper maintenance of data security and integrity. This is particularly important because APIs have increasingly become the top attack vector by cybercriminals.
API governance also helps ensure APIs remain at a premium when they are being created in the future, and also aids in their smooth management during the API life cycle.
