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The Pillars of an API Product
In the book, Continuous API Management, authors Mehdi Medjaoui, Erik Wilde, Ronnie Mitra, Mike Amundsen introduces the notion of API product & the pillars supporting it!
When we think around APIs, there are 3 distinctive parts behind it -
- Interfaces — A manifest where a provider shares around his capabilities
- Implementations — The meat! It’s the piece which provides the realisation of the advertised capabilities.
- Instances — This represents the actual runtime!
To create API, one need to put time & effort into managing all of these 3 aspects and as product continually matures and changes, everything needs to be kept up-to-date!
The 10 pillars of the API product were laid out as a guidance to help understanding & managing all of these above complexities! Not all of these pillars carry the same amount of weight. Some pillars can be stronger than others, and one even decide that some pillars don’t need much investment at all.
The important thing is that the combined strength of these pillars raises your API, even as it evolves and changes over time!
